


Spoiled for Choice

by x_los



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (1963), Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-01-09
Updated: 2008-04-06
Packaged: 2017-11-22 23:45:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 41,317
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/615710
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/x_los/pseuds/x_los
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the third year of the Master’s reign, he perfects Laz Labs technology. The Doctor as a box of chocolates.</p><p>This is the first fic I wrote in the fandom, and as such the quality's very shaky. But it feels a bit disingenuous to edit it now, so I'm posting it with that rather large caveat. It's also unfinished.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

Prequel: The Master Plays Favorites  
  
  
  
    In the third year of the Doctor’s captivity aboard the Valliant the planet Arcadia falls again (or for the first time, depending on who’s watching), this time to the Master’s new Time Lord Empire, and the Master perfects the Laz Labs technology. He watches the Doctor gasping, struggling against all the laws of their people’s biology, spooling back through his own regenerations, into different bodies and their accompanying personalities at the touch of his hand.  
  
    He adores the power, the sweet rictus of pain on the Doctor’s face. He slides the years back and forth to suit his own vanity. He makes his lover young and old in accordance with his mood. More practically, he needs his Doctors young and strong enough to suit his purposes. He can’t force a regeneration not yet created, but why would he need to when he has such an embarrassment of choice already?  
  
    The Master takes all of them, paying special attention to those he never had opportunity to. He’s not afraid of the Doctor in any of his bodies, even the ones that might be able to physically overpower him. The Doctor, bless him, isn’t stupid. This wouldn’t be any fun if he were.  
  
    The Doctor knows that there are impeccable cascading security systems just waiting to make him regret leaving their bedroom. An array of plans will take everyone involved down with them should the Master not maintain them. In the last three years he has taught the Doctor the price of defiance in an exchange rate of dead humans and lost places.  
  
    The Master permits certain incarnations of his lover the liberty of verbal disloyalty because it suits them, and he is a generous master. But there are others he requires to never utter a word against him, who he punishes when they don’t gush out a cascade of pleas and endearments, when their eyes have a flicker of doubt or a lack of devotion.  
  
    He develops preferences—what he likes to do with which, how long it’s permissible to keep him in any particular form. Though the Doctor is assured in brutal, physical terms that each version of him attracts the Master’s interest and attention, the Master plays favorites.


	2. The Doctor, As Himself

Chapter One: The Doctor, as Himself  
  
  
  
    The Doctor’s first body, always young, ever Theta, is treated excessively well, and there’s love in the gentle way the Master presses him down on the bed. At first the Master seems saner those nights, or at least drugged calm by nostalgia. The mania of the Master’s madness is stripped away, the harsh exterior gone. But the Doctor realizes this only serves to reveal the miasma at the other Time Lord’s seriously troubled core.   
  
    Even like this, the Master’s not all that much more forgiving. He won’t hurt the Doctor’s first body, but he’ll make the Doctor’s subsequent transformed forms feel the brunt of Theta’s disgusted look or failure to acquiesce readily enough to his lover’s whims.  
  
    The Doctor feels as if he’s playing the role of himself age 16, and it’s a demanding one. He’s an exaggeration, all fond whimsy, awed respect and brimming, impregnable devotion to his Koschei. The Master corrects his performance until it matches his memory, until the Doctor is brighter and truer and more than he had been even in the moment.  
  
    The Doctor wakes up to find himself being taken sedately. An early morning, brisk encounter, as if they may have to rush off to lecture or risk failing String Physics. Again.  
  
    “Knew you wouldn’t mind,” The Master laughs, actually sounding pleased rather than the various shades of mad the Doctor has learned to associate with the Master’s laughter over their last centuries. As if it might matter if he did mind. His left hip is anchored by the Master’s left hand and he can feel, gently, fingers clenching and unclenching the bit of muscle there. A hand twinning through his blonde hair.  
  
    He knows what to do. What the Master wants. He throws his arms around the Master’s neck, nuzzling up against the graceful column, so sensitive to their kind.  
  
    “Koschei, harder,” with gusto, as if he hasn’t played this role as thoroughly as a Broadway star after the show’s run years, “Mmm. Please, please, love, more.” He squirms under the thrusts like the overly energetic boy he was.  
  
    Inspired to generosity, the Master’s hand leaves the silky mess of hair. After a long, slide over the body beneath it, catching at those bright lips and demanding the suction of the wet heat within, and after running a seductive line over the neck that makes the Doctor gasp and reconsider to what extent actors become their parts, there’s a hand on his cock, stroking the Doctor away from feeling like a set piece in a reenactment, into a world where he never left, and this gentleness never dissipated so thoroughly he couldn’t believe it had ever been, and everything is true.  
  
    The Doctor had tried, just once, all pleading voice and big wet eyes in the afterglow, to use the influence this body had over the Master to rein in his actions. He wasn’t above that now. All that resulted was a silent, stone-faced Master storming out without even bothering to dress and returning seconds later with Lucy Saxon. He’d calmly shot her (with a banal, human gun, no less) and left, locking the Doctor in the bedroom with her corpse for two days.  
  
    When the Master had returned he’d had his men clear out the body and comforted his poor little Theta as soon as the door had swished shut (and there was no one to see this, the vulnerable corner of his madness, but the Doctor himself), rocking him. Making sure he was alright before, with the entitlement of a man unused to leaving his toy alone even a few hours, comfort-fucking the Doctor’s stressed, tired, hungry body into unconsciousness. The Master had never articulated a word of warning, as if it might break the spell of this body. After that he’d never needed to.  
  
    One day the Master asks how the Doctor could not have recognized him in the Death Zone, all those years ago, with his old man’s eyes.  
  
    “I knew,” he admitted, though really, through a stolen body, generations apart? The Master was asking quite a lot. Still, he had known. The Master casually invades his mind to check up on the claim, and the Doctor tries not to stiffen up and see it as a rape, because it wasn’t always, and the Master will feel his mental reticence and get quietly, poisonously angry, and he’s missed this enough to imagine himself willing. Upon confirming that yes, the Doctor had known him, had merely pretended not to out of shame, embarrassment and a fond wish it wasn’t really him, the Master chuckled in satisfaction.  
  
    “How long will you love me?” It’s their old question, and any other but the original answer would not only get someone else killed, it would be a lie. And he gives a Gallifreyan word for forever, which means immutable for a given period, here specified as the duration of his days.  
  
    “Liar.” Koshei smiles like the bits of broken glass on the beaches no one goes to. “But I’ll help you. I’ll help you tell the truth.” He slides into the Doctor again. “I’ll make you believe.”


	3. Mornings After

Chapter Two: Mornings After  
  
  
  
  
    Now he is dark haired and blue eyed and rather funnier. In the strange, untried youth of this body he is whip thin and a bit awkward. He’s bruised severely, and he sits gingerly, offering the Master a wry, polite smile every time he shifts and catches at a little splinter of pain. This is punishment for having been insufficiently grateful for yesterday’s excursion.  
  
    The Master had taken him down planet-side with a familiar teleport bracelet to show him the proposed sites for the new Citadel. These days the bracelet’s been modified and streamlined so that its use is only marked by a slightly uncomfortable pop of displacement. The Doctor tried hard not to think of Martha, whose small, brave wrist had carried the bracelet and with it so much responsibility. The air around Siberian plants they’re examining is bitterly cold. He is half Gallifreyan and can handle the wind chill, but he missed this regeneration’s fur jacket. Though he supposed it would be too big for this younger form of the body.  
  
    “In the Alps for the mountains, do you think? Or where London used to be, you do love it so much.” the Master spits this with thick sarcasm, but returns to absorption with the project with one of his lilting shifts of mood.  
  
    All the humans have been shipped off to the slave colonies. The planet is clean of them, reserved for what the Master calls the Reclamation Project. Earth seems empty and desolate without their chatter. The Doctor has trouble remembering the comfort of the humans’ many minds skittering across the back of his awareness. So absolute is the silence that it seems to stretch into the past and conceivable future, making it hard to remember the peaceful anonymity of a crowd. In his new life he is always singular and observed. It hurts to be in a world of two, when he’s so ashamed of the things he’s done.  
  
    “Of course we’d have to clear out those nasty wolf packs I’ve heard rumors of, but the remaining Toclafane would be delighted. Sweet little things, closest I ever came to understanding your obsession with the species.” All the little details of conquest, observed and managed. The Master likes his detailed plans. The Master’s consistency soothes the Doctor like a security blanket. “Rearguard duty just isn’t for them. They’ve a galaxy out there to win for me, almost cruel to coop this regiment up. They do love their work.”  
  
    The vegetation of Earth has all been burned off. In the distance a massive, spider-like agricultural combine seeds the soil (the Doctor cannot even call it earth in this sense, not even in his mind). The Doctor knows logically that the combine is scattering what will become dense fields of thick red grass, and that it will smell like old-Earth apples and not like the ashes he imagines he can taste. The Doctor knows that he will be brought to see the grass, and the coral trees as they begin to grow in earnest.  
  
    The Master plans to permanently alter the atmosphere, like his own Christmas excitation for Donna (who, brave, loud, giddy when the mood took her, too good for this new world, must be dead by now), only on a horrible scale. There will always be snow on the mountains. The Doctor will be unable to do anything but love New Gallifrey the instant he sees it. Like a father to his child. And he’d rather be blind than ever have to see it. How dare he love this spoiled world, what good has his love ever done anyone?  
  
    “What do you think Doctor?” The Master’s tone is sharp, he’s asked before while the Doctor was caught ruminating. “Are you even capable of paying attention? I would have thought you’d care, since this is your mess we’re cleaning up.” The Master circles him for a more direct confrontation, grabbing his lapels to address a remark, then sheathing his menace in a coy smile. “Where do you fancy our Citadel?”  
  
    “Are you playing Rassilon and Omega, like when we were children?” He has the memories of his fifth regeneration to tell him how that story ended. “Look how well that turned out the first time.” His tone is falsely bright and cheery, and his smile is somewhat clownish, though to the Master he knows it will seem mocking. The humans are gone and he’s not seen Jack in months. He feels less vulnerable without them around for the Master to use against him, and his old ruthless streak stirs almost imperceptibly.  
  
    “Anyway, how should I know anything about your new world order?” The Doctor’s voice is bemused and clueless, just to annoy the Master. “I do rely on your intellect. I haven’t the faintest notion. You did so well valiantly defending the last Gallifrey, I’m sure you’ll know just how to manage this one.”  
  
    The Master’s eyes narrow into dangerous little slits.  
  
    “Play stupid, Doctor. A clown and an idiot. You’d like to think you’re pretending.” He cocks an eyebrow, face expanding into a luxurious grin, breathing out accusations in a low, sweet tone. “Couldn’t think of a way to save Gallifrey, couldn’t out think me, standing here now at my pleasure in a body that got itself killed long ago? Be as smug as you dare, Doctor.” He begins to walk back to the reactors he wanted to inspect, knowing the Doctor will follow him because he has nowhere else to go and couldn’t survive long on the decimated Earth alone.  
  
    The Master turns with a final note, “I think a ship of slaves will experience a rather violent engine malfunction before they reach reassignment on Alpha Centauri because of you indecisiveness and, ohh, I don’t know,” The Master waves his hand impatiently, “Recklessness. Let’s go with recklessness. Got a nice sound to it, doesn’t it? Bit of a rippy noise. And if you happen to think of the screams sucked out of them by decompression and the families too tired to cry when the accident’s announced before you bitch and whimper all over the glory I’ve created here, so much the better.” The Doctor buttons up his fuming because it won’t solve anything. He’s just so angry with himself for not knowing better than this.  
  
    The Master swivels away again. “You never could see the scope of things. Limited, miserable, sanctimonious Doctor. You might have appreciated that I bothered to let you planetside at all. But noooooooo, meet the dazzling future with tired snarking and ingratitude. Crap date, you just see if I call you back.”  
  
    He returns with the Master to the Valliant, where the Master makes him regret ruining their first trip down to what will become the capital of his new Empire more personally. Those humans may have lived, the Master could say anything, make any number of empty threats, how could the Doctor tell? But now he knows he is no less vulnerable for the privacy of the empty, echoing Valliant.  
  
    But the Master pretends that he forgets slights quickly, and deprives the Doctor of any lasting pride he might have felt in defiance. The next morning Master leans back, observing him from across their surprisingly civilized breakfast table.  
  
    The Toclafane’s scouts brought in a few dozen domestibots from one of the bigger pleasure planets they’d subjected as a present for their Master. The Master’s destroyed more than one for mucking up some off-planet entrée, usually an intricate delicacy beyond the scope of their programming. The bots been updated with every food in the TARDIS matrix, and can’t poison the Time Lords without exploding at the thought.  
  
    The Master likes a big, chaotic breakfast spread, at odds with his obsessively selective evening meals, with their courses and perfectly complementary wines. The domestibots don’t have the will to complain when the Master wants a fry up, pancakes, a load of bagels with all the toppings, mushy Gallifreyan cereal, Fruity Pebbles, and the chilled morning soup of Altazaria all served within ten minutes of his request. Frequently he doesn’t touch most of it, deciding what he wants when he can actually see it, picking at little bits like a bored, spastic magpie.  
  
    Today he rubs his hands together with glee and takes a little portion of everything, OCD as ever, separating the foods by an inch apart so nothing touches, dolloping out portions in a radiating spiral, needing patterns and order fused with his whims.  
  
    “This table’s lovely isn’t it? All inky dark and shiny.” The Master runs on, not needing the Doctor to comment, just buzzing with residual energy from having reopened every healed cut on the Doctor’s body with a sharp bit of sea glass last night. The Master had cooed over the long shard when he brought it home to the Doctor last week. He’d found it at random (serendipitously, he called it) on the beach in Hawaii, where the giant wave energy generators were being constructed. There’s almost nothing sharper than the glass created when lightening strikes sand—every bit of the sand fixed instantly into a ragged, atom-thin edge. The Master had mentioned this last night.  
  
    He’d done it while dragging his mental nails through the Doctor’s memories of life as it was in this incarnation. The Doctor was still dizzy with confusion, probably wouldn’t remember his own past more or less correctly for a few days. Then weeks of sorting and processing to reconstruct what it was he had felt and thought important about those memories now, so many centuries later.  
  
    All of this would of course be interrupted by the constant hum of the laser screwdriver and the agony, the confusion of being ripped through forms. He prayed for a solid week of being Theta, just to recover. He wondered if the torture would stop when the Master felt he was truly broken, or if it would continue on into infinity, purposeless, until he didn’t feel it, and then past that, until subjection to the Master’s will defined him.  
  
    “Japanese lacquer.” The Doctor commented. Maybe the Master could respect skill, the beauty in objects if not in people. The Master was capable of regretting his actions, his wanton destructions. If he wasn’t, the Doctor didn’t have much to live for now.  
  
    “We’ve got the last one in the universe, then.” The Master looks even more delighted. “How about that? If I took you on it, that’d just be poetry. It and you, the last and the last. There’s a unity that suggests the inescapable, well, doubly so for you.” The Master spreads a napkin across his lap with a quick flick of his writs, then smooths it down suggestively. “I know I said I wouldn’t call, but you know I was only teasing. Any plans this evening?” He raps his knuckles across the lacquered table, complete with a suggestive eyebrow waggle.  
  
    “You know how I like pretty things. That glass is out of the picture though. Pity. Impossibly sharp, but that edge wears off pretty quickly. Speaking of, I’m changing your outfit after breakfast. You Number Two has lost it’s charm, sorry to say.” The Master is looking forward to watching the Doctor squirm through the meal, flinching from the glass wounds and the promised pain of the laser screwdriver. He wonders if those little twitches will make the food taste better.  
  
    The Doctor has contained his annoyance at this abundance of food. He knows the human slaves are kept so close to starvation they can work but never rebel. He imagines he can feel their starvation, but sympathetically starving himself, as he tried to months ago, led to a human servant being disemboweled before him at table for his noncompliance. The Master threatened to kill another unless the Doctor tucked in, then watched him eat ravenously as the body cooled on the floor.  
  
    The Doctor’s moralizing on the little things wore thin after he received confirmation of Martha’s death, as did his imperious silence, because it felt too much like death, and his silence hadn’t solved anything more than his speech. If every course of action proves useless then nothing means anything. Lucy told him that, whispered it for two days with dead eyes and a broken smile. Logically he’d known she was dead, this was her corpse, but the change escaped him, and he’d never felt closer to her.  
  
    Martha had always been at risk when she jumped. It temporarily created enough of a disturbance to counter her perception filter. There’d been no other way for her to travel around the globe, spreading his plan. One day she’d jumped into a mass of patrolling Toclafane, and that had been the last of dear Martha Jones. He wished she’d shared Jamie and Zoe’s fate, remembering nothing of her time with him, but alive out there somewhere, maybe happier, more innocent, for never having traveled with him.  
  
    "I used to have that atrocious haircut.” The Master’s speared a black pudding idly, more studying it than preparing to consume it, and looking up at the Doctor questioningly over the little lump. “Whatever possessed you? Have you no control over your regenerations?”  
  
    The Doctor’s silent, and it’s spoiling the Master’s morning.  
  
    “Talk,” he hisses, “Talk because you know that you’re happy to be here, with me, because it means you’re not alone, and you’re happy with anything I give you. Talk because you’re gagging to talk to me. Because you need me like you’ve always needed me.” The Doctor swallows.  
  
    “Now,” The Master sallies, “I loathe your stupid hair.”  
  
    “The Beatles were big when I visited Earth in my last body.” The Doctor insists. “This was clearly the best contemporary look.” The Master grins, because this kind of defiance is allowed, he likes this Doctor’s wit and he enjoys their trivial grousing, provided it doesn’t upset his plans.  
  
    “Shut up and drink your tea,” the Master says, testing, probing a bit at the balance of power he demonstrated last night. And he smiles when the Doctor hurries to do so, and begins to tell the Doctor what they’ll be doing that day interrupted occasionally by the Doctor’s friendly, mocking asides, and allowing that, because this is the way they work. They’re finally, properly talking, as they might have long ago if someone hadn’t been too stubborn and proud. Not that he minds punishing the Doctor for his sins and retraining him for companionship. Or rather polishing up the Doctor’s innate potential.  
  
    “Now have some salmon,” the Master suggests, knowing the Doctor despises salmon in all his forms the way he craves jelly babies indiscriminately. But the Doctor takes some without comment and eats it without a flicker of disdain, even looking up at him for approval, and the Master is so pleased with his progress he doesn’t even bother to cause that shuttle’s remote engine failure.


	4. Scientific Experiment

Spoiled for Choice  
Chapter Three: Scientific Experiment  
  
  
  
    He’s surprised by what his young third body looks like. His face has some character, but its edges are softened by youth. All he’s kept of the body he knows are sharp eyes and a general notion of similarity. He misses his confident, older body. He even yens for his dandy’s coats, though the Master rather encourages his dressing up in rich fabrics and expensively tailored cuts by only stocking these in the wardrobe.  
  
  
    He remembers that first year, his measurements in all his bodies being taken by a shaking, terrified tailor as the Master looked on, toying with his screwdriver and leering unrelentingly at his Doctor. The Doctor knows that this is one of his handsomer states. He should be grateful for that touch of dignity in his current position, when everything, even his biology, is at another’s mercy. It’s still jarring.  
  
    He’s at the Master’s side in the Valliant’s anachronistically advanced laboratory, which really should have tipped off the humans before the infamous morning of their downfall. He watches as the other Time Lord meticulously adjusts the details on the Toclafane casing, streamlining the spheres’ exteriors to make them better able to handle the stresses of interstellar flight. Because this is where the Master wants him to be, he can’t do anything but watch. And the Doctor, whose instinct is always to aid, to improve, can’t watch without wanting to help, to do something. And can’t want anything these days without feeling a fair bit ill with self-loathing.  
  
    He thinks of the Keller Machine, which had a certain brilliance before it got away from the Master, and realizes how much the Master’s grown since then. The Toclafane are not fueled by the mindless hungry need of the parasite within the Keller Machine. Their loyalty to the Master is primary, and should it ever waver, the Master could kill them all instantly.  
  
    Their centralized consciousness has made them vulnerable to the psychic backdoor the Master established when he helped them craft their spheres and come back to their ancestral home. In a way, the Doctor realizes, he himself taught the Master to refine his plans through the spats of their younger days. He was the whetstone the Master honed himself on, and now the Master is slicing through the universe, returning to the Doctor every night to sharpen his edge.  
  
    “Sulking doesn’t suit you. You seem to think so, and I hate to let any idiocy of yours go un-disabused.” The Master’s remark lands solidly in the middle of the Doctor’s haze of gloom, waking him up a bit, and the Doctor tosses his curly blonde hair irritably. “Shouldn’t you like to pick up a spanner and see to that layer of casing? It’s going to get done anyway, regardless of whether you assist me. It’d just go faster and we could go find something more entertaining to do.”  
  
    The Doctor laughs at the absurdity of this, the very idea he’d be complicit in this madness, with the short, barking, condescending laugh he had in this regeneration. The Master automatically smacks him, then after a moment’s consideration hauls back and does it again a bit harder.  
  
    “You know better than to laugh at me. Miseryguts. If you’re so unhappy here we’ll saddle up my Paradox Machine and go make some new friends. And we could get some lunch. We could try the famous delis of New Earth? Betcha we wouldn’t have to pay. It’s been aaaaages since I compression-eliminated anyone, let alone anyone in the service industry. That’d be precious. Wee little uniforms.” He chuckles at the Doctor’s expression of mounting anger as the blond Time Lord rubs at his abused jaw sullenly.  
  
    “You spent this entire regeneration wanting off Earth, and what do you do when I offer you the galaxy? Reject it in favor of exile. Your stomach grumbles gratingly enough to distract me from my project and I propose the galaxy’s accompanying sandwiches, and you look like I’ve committed atrocious genetic experiments on your puppy. Someone doesn’t know what he wants.”  
  
    The Master taps the spanner he’s been working with on the lab table in that inevitable rhythm. “And look at you here now, my concubine instead of my partner, here in the wake of our race’s passing, in the ashes of all things. Fewer people overall would have died if you’d said yes. We’d have responded to the threat of the Time War faster and more effectively than the council ever did- that’s whole systems preserved right there. The universe might be, even by your exacting standards, better off. We’d still have a home-planet at least. All that struggle leading you to the inexorable result.” The taping stills. “Was it worth it, Doctor? The resistance, and the suffering?”  
  
    “It was,” the Doctor says with bald courage. “I can’t change the accidents of history or speak for anyone beyond myself. But struggle for one’s own view of the universe in the face of opposition and adversity? I thought you’d know the value of that. You’re utterly unprincipled, but you understand yourself at least well enough to know that you’re defined by your will.” The Master chooses not to answer, concentrating on manipulating the delicate little spanner deep in the wiring. Probably tuning the interface between the improved case and the sensor network, from what the Doctor could see.  
  
    The Doctor remembered a lonely exile in which he’d waited, yearned for their next encounter. He’d been horrified at each atrocity, yet impressed despite himself with the Master’s will to break free of Gallifreyan convention, to survive, to push himself to the limits of his potential rather than moldering with their moribund people. Gallifrey had cast out them both, could never respect them, and in those days he’d told himself that he was no worse for their rejection. At least they both had the courage to actually live.  
  
    Now his tenth regeneration might have wished that he had crawled back and begged pardon, just for the privilege of spending those lost centuries in the fleeting company of his own kind. Did that make him a weaker man, or a wiser one?  
  
    The Master folds up the sides of the Toclafane case. Like trying to recreate an orange with its empty peel. The Doctor used to sob, jagged in his more vulnerable tenth body, over what had become of the humans, but now he soothed himself with the knowledge that there was nothing human left in those spheres but a bit of skin and the perverted memory of fighting against the dark. And he couldn’t mourn that. He was too tired. He may have been housed in a young body, but in this form he had an old man’s hearts.  
  
    “Done,” the Master singsongs, smiling broadly at the Doctor, toying with the spanner, flipping it lazily between his fingers. He’s wearing his old black leather gloves, or ones very like them, ostensibly to protect his hands from the nasty sharp edges and chemicals inside the ball, should his grip slip. It never does.  
  
    The Master’s regenerations have always had elegant, capable hands. When they were children Koshei had mastered the Traken violin. He would play for his best friend when he was bored, or when Theta pleaded sufficiently, always giving in with the indulgent air of spoiling him. The Doctor found himself staring at those hands now, remembering their exactitude, their precision. The Master catches him and favors him with a slight little smile, holding the (surprisingly light) empty Toclafane ball up in one hand for the Doctor to inspect. The Doctor suddenly realizes how close they’re sitting, and wonders which of them drifted closer to the other’s orbit.  
  
    “Good, isn’t it?” The Master asks, breath ghosting across the gleaming metal, fogging it.  
  
    “It’s the work of a scientific genius and nothing less. As you know.” He can’t deny that the Master has reached a new standard in cyber-organics. It would be petty to try. The Master’s smirk stretches under the praise, nearly freely given. “Whether it’s conscionable, however, is a different question.”  
  
    “My conscience is quite elastic these days, my dear Doctor. How’s yours?” Without waiting for an answer, he jumps out of his lab chair and stretches like a cat, gently setting down the Toclafane ball and grabbing the Doctor by the hand in one motion. “We’re going to celebrate. You’re going to give me a bit of praise for my achievement.”  
  
    “I rather thought I just did,” the Doctor reminds him.  
  
    “And countered it with your nasty moralizing." The Master clucks his tongue. "Mixed messages, Doctor. And you can’t even tell me I’m a genius with your special blend of awe and terror and—I like how you used to shudder it through your tight morals like a prayer. Mmm, you couldn’t help but tell me. I like to hear it all matter-of-fact, don’t get me wrong,” He’d nearly gotten himself killed sticking around to hear the Doctor verbally suck him off over the Keller Machine debacle, after all, “but I know you’ve got a higher potential than that. No, you’re going to try again. Going to invent a whole new order of accolades.” The Master runs his hand down the Doctor’s lab coat and slips inside for a quick fondle. “Sing my praises.”  
  
    The Master pulls him out of the lab, and the Doctor’s more than a little glad to leave that room, with its intellectual stimulation and quiet horrors, muted by distance and clean white walls. The Master is tapping his own rhythm into the Doctor’s wrist, making the Doctor feel if not hear it, a precursor to the Master’s physical and psychic invasions. A sort of promise that invades his will like hypnotism, but more subtle.  
  
    They reach their bedroom, and it is their bedroom inescapably by now. The Master is loath to leave him for any length of time. He requires the Doctor as a constant companion, his constant audience. When the Master sleeps there’s no question of the Doctor leaving the bed for anything but the physical necessities, he’s been punished before for it. The Doctor doesn’t know whether the Master fears the Doctor’s capacity for sabotage or something else. He wonders if the Master dreams of the war, as his own eighth, ninth, and tenth bodies do so vividly and persistently.  
  
    The Doctor knows he can be gruff and arrogant in this form. Normally he’d chafe at such restriction. But he’s beyond that now. In the desperate solitude of his mind, truer than any exile, he welcomes the connection.  
  
    The flattery in the constant attention is almost too intensely sweet, even though the Doctor knows it’s boned with madness and a wrathful desire to hurt him that makes the Master cling too hard in his sleep, pressing need and pain into the Doctor’s ribs with fingers that clutch. And should he stir in the Master’s grasp in the short night observed by their kind, those fingers come alive and press him down into the bed, and the body they belong to stirs automatically to claim him, using whatever wetness is left in him from the requisite bout before bed to fuck him to still acquiescence. The Master, it seems, is never more tired than he is determined to remind the Doctor of his new position.  
  
    The Master holds out his gloved hands to the Doctor, who obediently removes the leather and puts them on the bedside table. The Master walks him to the wall, pressing him up against it with his body, and holds his naked hands to the Doctor’s skull. He’s not yet stretching his telepathy, simply tapping his beat idly.  
  
  
    “Remember in that prison when you wouldn’t so much as touch me? Sensible, cautious Doctor, couldn’t even take my hand?” Suddenly and brutally his mind is full of the Master, ghosting over that memory and chuckling harshly at it, the sound echoing inside his head. Then his mind is clouded with bright white daggers of pleasure, so much he has to bite his lower lip to keep from an undignified little squeal. This becomes a low, urgent strumming that goes straight to his groin and ghosts his mouth with imagined, exquisite tastes.  
  
  
    He moves his arms to bat the Master off and pull him in closer and finds the Master’s not allowing him to do anything of the kind. He could fight the mental block if there weren’t so much else going on. As is it’s nearly impossible just to feel everything.  
  
    “Beg me,” The Master’s tone is conversational, if a bit breathy, “To touch you. Tell me you’re sorry.” The Doctor grits his teeth, and while the Master’s Keller Machine might have destroyed his mind through fear, the Master himself is infinitely subtler. The mental connection adjusts to make use of the surface of his brain’s electrical energy, playing with the charges and spiking them painfully well whenever the Doctor trembles or leans up into him, as he can’t now stop himself from doing.  
  
  
    “I’m sorry,” escapes from his mouth nearly unwittingly.  
  
  
    “Mean it.” The Master readjusts the level of sensation carried by the Doctor’s spine, making it almost unbearably good when his hands grip harshly at the column, rubbing and twisting their way up and down only to do it over again, backwards and with a twist, even as he bites the Doctor’s sensitive neck.  
  
  
    The Master remembers causing a phone wire to nearly strangle this neck to death over the phone, the Doctor’s choking, gasping noises squirming down the sentient line just for him, their author. With the Doctor’s respiratory bypass that could have gone on for a good while longer before he’d had to stop for fear of brining the fun to a halt. Damn he’d enjoyed that. Wanted to take him over his sad, primitive little lab table in exchange for his life. Pity he’d stolen the dematerialization circuit to bargain with instead. Such a perfect, if frustrating, adversary. ‘Oh well,’ he thought, pushing the small of the Doctor’s back forward to arch pleasantly against his groin, ‘All’s well that ends well.’  
  
  
    “I’m sorry, please, please, let me in, have me, allow me touch to you.” He rewards the Doctor, gives him his hands back, and they clutch frantically that the Master, one shakily working towards a contact point, not that contact is a necessity now, but just to jump-start things on the Master’s end. He wants to open up the Master so that all of this can be shared, and the mental ecstasy the Master’s given him can flow between them, amplified by some of the Doctor’s own ideas. The Master catches his hand.  
  
    “No.” It’s almost crushing. The Doctor feels one-sided and unwanted and alone. The Master knows because he’s rooting through the Doctor’s experiential mind with cheery impunity. “About time you got a taste of your own sanctimonious medicine.” The Master snickers at the Doctor’s pain. The Doctor doesn’t whimper, though he’d like to right about now. He thinks if he came to the Master for comfort he’d find nothing but distaste, and he can’t bear to have the suspicion confirmed. “Beg me to fuck you.”  
  
    “Please, please, you can have-- I want you to-- Make me--” The Master shudders but doesn’t give.  
  
    “Use my name.”  
  
    “Master!” The Doctor sobs, “Master please!” The Master hands him a tube of cream and the Doctor rips at the lid, working the Master out of his clothes and slathering the man’s cock even as he sheds his own covering under the Master’s watchful gaze. He’s too far-gone to care that he’s playing handmaiden to his own destruction. The Master forces his way inside him, picking up the Doctor’s legs and wrapping them around him, using the wall for balance. He gasps as the Doctor enters his mind in turn. The Master doesn’t stop to adjust but shoves himself deeper, wanting more, craving overload and getting it.  
  
    He works the Doctor furiously, denied want and anger at this version of the Doctor bubbling up in him after centuries in which it was repressed in favor of other concerns but never forgotten. He feels the Doctor clench like he’s about to come and derails that nerve impulse in its tracks, because he’s no where near done with this, not even close to beating out of the Doctor all the satisfaction of their smothered opportunities.  
  
    He can practically taste all the times the Doctor opposed him, mindlessly obstinate and cruel as a child. He rams his tongue into the Doctor’s mouth to erase the bitterness. Buried in the Doctor, who is mindlessly glad of his presence, he believes that this time he won’t lose. He won’t be left alone with the broken pieces of a plan. He’s whole and invincible.  
  
    He jackknifes into the Doctor, who rolls beneath him like the oceans below, beautiful and shining and full of life and completely his. Feeling the pressure building he generously removes his mental finger from the nerve, and in a few strokes the whimpering Doctor’s body is shuddering through a climax while still squeezing him like the needy little thing the Doctor is, and this is bliss beyond anything.  
  
Slowly he moves from the wall to the bed, still shakily cradling the Doctor, and collapses on top of him. He’d like to sleep, but even more he’d like a bit of a gloat.  
    “You begged for it,” he reminds the man underneath him, whose body is still so intimately connected to his own. “Remember that, Doctor.”  
  
    The Doctor doesn’t need the reminder. Of course the Master would have taken him anyway, eventually. And no one can hold out long against a telepath of the Master’s caliber. And there was the Master’s mood and the distant hostages to consider. But still. He’d begged. He’d given that away without even much of a fight.  
  
    “I never thought I’d come to this.” Again, the Doctor adds with a private loathing.  
  
    “Too proud,” The Master chastises him, too sated to mind the Doctor’s sniping, too secure in the body beneath him. “I never thought we wouldn’t.” Something suddenly comes to him, and he props his arms around the Doctor and sits up. “And to reiterate, the puppy thing was Ushas, and I’m shocked you accused me just because it ended up in my room. Maybe it was trying to come home and find you, ever think of that?”  
  
    “I’ve said sorry for this before.”  
  
    “Yes well,” the Master grumbles without much ill-will, “It’s just so classically her I was offended you’d even think it. My plans are always better than that.”  
  
    “What, you were going to enlist hostile aliens to possess my puppy, order the puppy to kill and create enough of a disruption in the Academy that you could take over?” The Doctor raises an elegant eyebrow.  
  
    The Master chuckles.  
  
    “Didn’t even think of it. It’d have been funny though. Borusa would have been the first to fall to the death-puppy. Bitch dared flunk me in thermodynamic relations. Me!”  
  
    “On second thought you actually should have.” The Doctor chose to be politic and not mention that, while brilliant, the Master should have studied for his thermodynamic relations final a bit harder the night before the exam, rather than opting to fuck his best friend a bit harder at said time. “It would have been a nobler end for poor Shakespeare and we wouldn’t have had to vacation in the Death Zone.”  
  
    “What, and miss the hilarity of Cybamen hopscotch?”  
  
    “This is an awfully strange conversation to be having while still, respectively, lodged in and impaled by someone.” The Doctor pointed out. “It truly speaks to your interest in the moment.”  
  
    “Ooooh, you wanted a  _moment_.” The Master smirked and moved around a bit inside the Doctor. “Come on then,” he squeezed the Doctor’s ass affectionately. “Let’s fuck like gentlemen.”


	5. Giving Alms to the Birds

Chapter 4  
Giving Alms to the Birds

 

“He scalped its head, removing the hair, and broke and removed the teeth. The vultures swarmed around and began eating its flesh. Squawking and shoving each other, the vultures completely consumed everything except for its skeleton. The man in white came back to the body and proceeded to shatter the skeleton into pieces. The vultures swarmed around, this time leaving nothing.” 

paraphrased from Tibetan Sky Burial, by Rachel Laribee

 

 

Before the Master can adjust the settings on his laser screwdriver to de-age the Doctor’s fourth body he is interrupted.

“You’re not making me young for sex. Though you’d like to think so.” The Doctor’s voice is so deep and pleasant that the words lack the insolence of their content. 

“Don’t tell me what— as if you’d know.” The Master mumbles, though he can’t hear himself over the drums and isn’t sure whether he spoke aloud. He only knows how loud they are today and how he struggles his way through the simplest thoughts, and one of them is this one, this one will. This one will what? The Master is denied even the comfort of a verb that can define and contain and shield him from his need. 

The Master collapses on a high backed chair in one of the Valliant’s parlors. He prefers the TARDIS’s main library, but the drums are so overwhelming just now that he can’t take the additional psychic strain of the paradox machine on his senses without making himself sick. He wishes he could stop thinking but his mind whirls on with relentless clockwork precision. 

He feels like his brain physically splits along the fault line of every incomplete thought. The tendrils throb in insistent chorus, bits of him loudly screaming for attention and action. His brain is being picked apart by a multitude of carrion birds, he’s enduring a living sky burial. They’re lowering their maws in rhythm, tap tap tap TAPing their beaks into the flesh, and they cannot be controlled. 

Planning and ruminating, which usually give some order to his thoughts and quell the drums, or at least take in the madness and spit it back out as determination or rage, have become impossible. The Master can’t keep to any one stream of thought. His self is cracked, fractured— and he cannot become accustomed to this, is never resigned to it, every fucking time he is terrified.

He is a slave to this and there is nothing he could ever hate more. He feels like he’s going to throw up again but he’s emptied his stomach and he knows dry heaving does nothing to make him feel better. 

He decides he wants to hear why he isn’t making the Doctor younger for his vanity and pleasure. The Doctor is a distraction (though he refuses to understand, to acknowledge his own drums or share his, to feel this with him as he should, as he would if he cared for him), better than anything else he’s known. Talking to him allows the Master’s mind to focus shakily on a single conversation, pin down the rudiments of a narrative. And his brain is so addled that he doesn’t know just now why he has a compulsion to press the button, and can’t remember whether he normally understands the desire. 

“You want me young, younger than I ever was in these forms, because you can’t bear the thought of my death. It’s always horrified you, and you had to control it, by killing me yourself, by making me older under your terms, and then by keeping me perpetually young. You do this so that you never have to stare at old skin and see what being alone looks like.” The Doctor speaks plainly because the he knows the Master won’t remember what was said specifically now, when the drums are high. 

The Master laughs raggedly because it’s absurd, and this is the version he killed, threw from a great height just to watch his angel try and fly and he laughed when the Doctor was revealed to have bones as brittle as anyone else’s, flapping clothes instead of wings. But the thought of the Doctor’s crumpled body returns to him like the sick throb of the paradox machine. Did he hear the Doctor’s spine break or only imagine it? He hisses at the Doctor.

“Shut the fuck up. What would you know. Weren’t even there, weren’t even THERE.” At the fall of the Cruciform. When he’d run. When he’d had to slink into a human body and hide like a beaten dog. He’d been so scared. And earlier, before that, the first time the Doctor left him alone-- familiar and primary to the Master’s personal cosmology as original sin was to that of the humans he’d subjected. 

The Doctor’s large eyes are kind and the Master hates his kindness because this is the version that pities him most and he can’t abide the Doctor’s pity any more than the fucking paradox. God he hurts everywhere, god, how must he look, how must he look?

“I’m sorry.” The Doctor says as if it can absolve the sin of his absence, his long absence, and of his own volition, as if he could un-choose, and the Master wonders if he could build a better paradox machine and let the Doctor start again. Where exactly did everything go wrong? Could he anatomize disaster, pinpoint an instant and restart from there? Why the fuck would the Doctor even deserve that chance when he ruined everything the first time and why would the Master give up the universe now he has it, has everything? 

He wants to sneer but his face feels disconnected and dead like the rotting body of that American in San Francisco. The Doctor is saying something patiently, repeatedly, and the rhythm is good and soothing. He closes his eyes to appreciate it and he has an idea of what he wants. His will is a blessing, and it comes to guide him out of the horror of noise and pressure and terror. 

“Come read to me.” He commands, his eyes still shut. He modifies his demand. “Come over here, and read to me.”

“What would you like?” The Doctor’s voice is gentle. The Master chuckles.

“Does it matter?” You always do as you like anyway. He knows better than to say. The Doctor hunts a book from the shelves, stocked from the TARDIS’s overflowing shelves, and the Master feels his head being lifted and his torso shifted, so he’s positioned in with his head in the Doctor’s lap like a child. He feels insulted but too incapacitated to lash out.

The Doctor’s pleasing voice reads him something he pays no attention to. He concentrates on learning this new rhythm, on the Doctor’s heartsbeat, on breathing in and out, and the drums lessen. He is a Time Lord, and even crazed and delusional he knows it takes hours like he knows he must still be breathing. But his ability to sense timelines has begun to consume itself: horrible things are happening right now have happened will happen again. He has witnessed them is doing them is planning them, glorying dreading regretting. 

The Doctor doesn’t falter or stop reading. The Master realizes one long hand is rubbing at his temples, not to pick away at his distracted mind, which would anyway be unfathomable right now to the outside observer, but to ease the incredible tension. He’s just noticed that his skull aches as if it’s being smashed in and the exposed axons and dendrites flayed and burned. For a human his temperature would be feverish. For a Time Lord he is immolating. 

“How are you? Feeling better?” The Doctor asks, and the Master knows it would hurt to nod so he pats the thigh he’s resting on softly, arhythmically, just to show he can. He slides into his proper relation with time like water in a glass being tilted and dumped out. He feels his jaw being worked open by long, insistent fingers, and something soft and gummy and pleasant being placed in his mouth. He sucks it until it dissolves, and accepts another and another. The sugar makes him feel less gutted and detached. 

“Where did you even get those?” He cracks as if unused to his voice, after eating what must have been half the bag.

“You had some in your coat pocket. I lifted them a few weeks back.”

“Oh.” He’s not even bothered by the theft of his property, though probably he’ll be annoyed later. He knows the Doctor must have been hoarding them as a treat for himself, filched carefully and highly prized. He must have been rationing them, unsure whether he’d ever see more. His favorite. Half the bag gone. “A proper doctor.” The Master comments, with something like the gratitude he can’t lower himself to express. He’s already so disgustingly humbled by his treacherous body.

Neither can he ask or tell the Doctor to continue, but he tugs at the arm holding the book like little boys do when they want something, and the Doctor resumes.

“forgiveness time--” the Master chuckles harshly at the first words he’s heard and understood of the book. It’s strange to recognize that the Doctor’s reading something in English after months of speaking and hearing exclusively Gallifreyan and the Toclafane’s language, so different from that of the Earth he conquered as to be unrecognizable as its heir. All he’s heard that meant anything to him were his own capitoline accent and the Doctor’s voice, peppered with hints of the somewhat old-fashioned Lungbarrow tones of his childhood. 

New bodies bring new intonations, which are rendered into different accents by TARDIS translation. A Time Lord speaker typically, in many cases automatically, adopts new ways of relating to foreign languages they know well, switching the manner of their speech to mark the change in their basic personhood. But a native Gallifreyan accent can only evolve over time, and is never naturally renewed by regeneration. 

The Doctor still sounds like Theta, if slightly less provincial, and, comfortingly, he always will. Theirs are the only accents that remain. Only the Doctor and the Master can now distinguish that they speak the same language slightly differently. Hearing English makes him remember that lost complexity, those dead, silent tongues and still minds. He’s surprised to find it feels like swallowing a stone (like birds do to digest) that settles in his stomach and aches.

Later he will slip back into this room, maddened by not knowing exactly how long he spent there when time is normally the aspect of the world most familiar to his senses. He will realize the poem was from a late page in a complete anthology, and the Doctor had read to him for a length of time he cannot pass off as insignificant. 

“I touch now his despair,/ he felt as bad as Whitman on his tower/ but he did not swim out with me or my brother/ as he had threatened—”  
Today was a Bad Day, but it was the best Bad Day the Master could remember. And he knew the Doctor hadn’t had to do this, and had done it for him.

“I cannot read that wretched mind, so strong/ &so undone. I’ve always tried. I- I’m/ trying to forgive/”

And the drums seemed to recede, to come from somewhere farther away. 

 

* “Also I love him: me he’s done no wrong” #145 of John Berryman’s Dream Songs


	6. Innings, With Overs

Chapter Five:

Innings, with Overs

 

When they were five his new friend Theta taught him to play hide and seek. It was a strange, unnatural game for Koschei. On Gallifrey diversions had so much purpose they were hardly diverting. They trained you for something you’d do later in life, all logic and dexterity and memorization. But hide and seek was exotic and decadently useless. It was actually fun. A lot like Theta.

 

One day when they were seven he’d searched for an hour. They were playing at Theta’s family’s holiday cottage outside the dome. But Theta wasn’t hiding perched in the wide silver branches of the trees that ringed the property. Nor was he anywhere in the ancient, decrepit barn, full of tools unfathomable to boys learning the basics of black hole mechanics in preparation for entering the Academy, who’d never heard of reaping grain or given thought to how they were fed. The meadow, with its frost-coated grass, shaking brittle in the winter gusts, was bare and unpeopled. Theta must have found the best hiding spot yet, and despite his annoyance Koschei was impressed with clever little Thete, who’d really done it this time.

 

Snow started to fall in earnest. Small Koschei hadn’t the stamina of an adult Gallifreyan. He grew numb and cold in his play clothes, which were expensive city fashions, meant for the dome and unsuited to the sudden change in the weather. But he was determined to find Thete’s hiding spot.

 

Eventually he began to worry more for Theta than for his own victory. Theta was tiny, a few months younger, and hadn’t been moving about searching and thus had nothing to keep him warm--Koschei knew a body at rest lost heat at a faster rate than a body in motion. Snow lashed in wicked drifts, white and blinding, and he couldn’t find Theta now if he’d known exactly where to look.

 

He thought of that small, fair body curled somewhere, shivering and determined and so terribly cold, too brave for his own good, always stupidly running into danger, too silly to give up the game and just come out.

 

Swallowing his pride, he called the all clear. No response. He called again and again, into the growing wind, wondering if he was even audible. Panicking, he ran inside to get help, willing to tell the adults he’d lost Theta and get into the worst trouble of his life if only they’d help him search for his best friend.

 

He threw open the door with a heinous clatter, only to find himself staring directly at Theta, who was sitting at the table, hands stilled in the action of playing with some toy. Koschei’s loud entry had startled the other boy, who looked up at him with innocent surprise.

 

“Where were you, where were you hiding?” He’d hissed. “How long have you been in here?”

 

“About thirty three minutes and 16 and a half recs.” Theta was nonchalant. “It took too long. It’s a silly game, I’d forgotten we were even playing.” And he had, he honestly had, you could just tell from his doe-eyed, bloody stupid expression. “Come look at this, Kos--”

 

He’d hauled back and smacked Theta then, hard across the jaw. Theta was dazed. Tears welled in his wide blue eyes, making them shine.

 

“Koschei why’d you do that? I’m sorry you’ve been out there all this time, but you should have come in too when it got cold!”

 

He’d crushed Theta to his chest with all the strength he had, wanting him to feel the brutality of his worry in his small, warm, safe bones. He clawed wickedly into his ribs with icy fingers, bitterly chilled, and all for stupid, ungrateful Theta.

 

It wasn’t enough of a punishment, so he scrabbled at his mind, managed to find a purchase and hold him there. He knew it was wrong to be inside someone else’s mind like this, by force, but he didn’t understand why, no one had explained that, and it felt reassuring to be tucked inside, good and exciting in a way he had no real words for.

 

“Don’t you ever, ever do that again. You’ll never do that to me again.” He pushed his worry and anger into the other boy, who buckled under the strange, unprecedented assault. Theta could not breathe, let alone verbalize a response, and so Koschei plucked the promise from his struggling consciousness, which burbled apologies and vows that soothed his frayed nerves. He put Theta down, not slipping out of his mind just yet (it felt so good, and welcoming now that Theta’d stopped struggling), and let him breathe.

 

Years later, when he realized he wanted Theta (by now he knew what he’d done that day, what squirming into someone else’s mind like that was called and what it meant—lord, hadn’t he been precocious?), he’d remembered this. And known Theta would be hopeless without him, needed him to take care of him. Because someday he really would be lost in the snow, the idiot. And Koschei would search for him, always.

 

He didn’t know then that Theta hadn’t ever learned his lesson, maybe wasn’t capable of learning it. He could promise all he liked but Theta, or rather the Doctor, couldn’t be held to any vow. Always running to the next point of light in the sky. The Doctor’s definition of love was more expansive, impermanent and far, far frailer than the Master’s.

 

He didn’t know then that hide and seek really was training, just like any other Gallifreyan pastime. He’d be playing this game for centuries. Long past when it had ceased to amuse. Hunting Theta across the stars till their names changed and their bodies fell away and the universe rippled and fluxed. One true thing. Always.

 

***

“Flavia told me something once.”

The Master rolled his eyes. “She was a politician, I imagine she told rather a lot of people something at one point or another. Did you want a medal?” The Master’s trying to coax a series of equations into a duplication of Rassilon’s coronet’s psychic wave structure, and the coronet’s reminded the Doctor of Flavia, and the particularly strange day he met her. Even though the Master was arguably the most innovative (some might say heinously irresponsible, but neither remaining time lord had ever cared overmuch for traditional scientific procedure) expert in the field of psychic wave structure manipulation, back when there had been such a field, the numbers are refusing to coalesse into something useable.

The Master is missing something.

He punches up pounding, percussive music on his modified i-pod controller, and the wireless speaker system smothers the room in bass. It’s not an awful drums day, but neither are they in abeyance. The Master is planning to use the coronet to extend Archangel over a wide swath, especially to better affect species whose neurological structure differs enough from that of humans to render the current signal ineffective. He’s had the Toclafane mining whole systems with satellites to carry the signal rather than conquering anything just now, and the Doctor’s been more at ease, more obliging because of it.

It’ll be a different story when he actually puts the satellites to use and starts subjecting new territory. The Doctor will close up like a violet does at night, and the Master will have to pry his affections out with threats and manipulation. He’ll miss waking up with a mouth on his cock and going to sleep with a body wrapped around his rather than just pinned down against him like a child’s stuffed toy. He’s not indifferent to the enthused hunger that had the Doctor clawing at his chest and pleading for more. That will evaporate with the invasion force’s next push.

When he’s back to being unwilling, it’ll be like the first year. The Doctor will be unresponsive, not even willing to speak to him, like a dead thing ( _dead like everyone else_ ). And in the mind he’s had to rip open, _not even been invited into_ , there will be the automatic, physical joy of being with his Master. But it will be smothered in thoughts of others and notions of shame that have nothing to do with him, who should be the Doctor’s only concern.

The Master worries that he’s deliberately stalling. Missing something because he doesn’t want to see it. And wouldn’t that be fucking disgusting.

To bring himself back to the task at hand he taps down the music’s volume and addresses the Doctor, who’s been silently reading, absently eating jelly babies from the crates of preserved earth food the Master managed to scrounge from the few remaining warehouses on the surface sometime after his last Bad Day. ‘A few warehouses’ translates to silly amounts of the stuff in the hold, whole flats of the candy alone. The Master had brought a great box of the individual baggies into their bedroom and left it conspicuously open.

“How long do you think it took Rassilon to get this one down?” The Master tap-tap-tap-TAPs his pen tip against his teeth.

“Are you asking because you’d like me to make an educated guess, so you can engage in neurotic competition with a dead semi-mythical figure who at this point never actually existed anyway?”

The Master just looked at him witheringly, because obviously, yes.

“Maybe decades. Legend does say his regime engaged in political discourse for a good long while before it descended into autocracy. That would indicate the coronet’s completion, wouldn’t it? And is there anything you don’t _have_  to be the best at?”

“Cricket.” The Master deadpanned. “You’re the sticky wicket in all my plans. Hand me the damn hammer, I think these focus crystals are made of rock candy.”

“Only you could take a perfectly natural term like ‘sticky wicket’ and make it sound like an explicitly lewd endearment.” The Doctor huffed, not actually handing him the hammer, but instead magnifying lenses. The Master snapped them onto his face irritably and clicked down the shutters. The gesture’s pique was lost on the Doctor, who was distractedly observing that the Master’s brown eyes looked preternatural, as large and bright as a cat’s.

“I’ve said it before, you stimulate and inspire me. Sometimes just to rather flat innuendo-- oh YES!” The Master pumped his fist in the air, “That’s part of it then, I’ve been doing up the inter-crystal links all sloppy and ad-hoc. One might almost think this was your work, Doctor.”

“Ha.” The Doctor’s laugh was significantly dryer than the over-recycled air in the Valliant. “Yes, mock the scientific technique of the man not so much as allowed to look longingly at his sonic screwdriver, let alone use it to any technological purpose. That’s not a low blow. ”

“You barely used your favorite toy in that body anyway. Can’t be pining too hard.” The Master was busy, working with an oddly methodical flurry of action. He had a coil of wire wrapped around each hand, and he was lacing and weaving these around a metal base to create a net to hold the crystals, diving and swinging rapidly. It was dizzying to watch, but the Doctor followed with the fascination of a cat chasing a light reflection on the wall, impressed as usual with the Master in his full techno-mode.

“Well I didn’t get a chance to use my celery either, but it was still a great comfort to me!” The Master chuckled much as he had in another body, at the unintentional touch of comedy in this flustered, tetchy, naive, but very pretty Doctor. The Doctor in question simply pouted. He rolled his chapped lower lip between his teeth inelegantly to moisten it before leaping back to their earlier topic.

“Flavia--”

“Well, say I did make you something you could poke around with and allowed you access to your own lab projects,” The Master interrupted. “How will I know you’re not getting up to something nefarious, hmm?”

“I think you’re confusing us,” The Doctor’s dry tone was back, having been upgraded to a yet crisper ‘could parch the Thames a second time’ theme. “Hello, I’m the Doctor, and I’d never, oh, say, attempt to interfere with the signing of the Magna Carta or anything else respectably ‘nefarious.’ It’s not my style.” He introduced himself with a small wave.

“I suppose I can whip something up, with the understanding that any misuse will make someone-not-us unpleasantly crispy, and it’ll be some adorable little human spawn you’ll bawl your eyes out of their sockets over.”

The Doctor beams but is otherwise ungrateful.

“Aren’t you forgetting something?” The Master snaps.

“Oh, oh yes! Thank you so much, Master.” There it is, a little shiver in his spine at that enthused voice giving up his name like an offering. Though he shouldn’t have had to prompt it. Perhaps being so soft on this one was a mistake, he thinks. But then the Doctor taps his Master’s hand and cocks his head with a smile, the whole suite of gestures seeming to communicate that he’s having a pleasant morning here with him. It’s the kind of genuine, subtle display that can’t be coaxed or performed, and the Master forgets he was annoyed, tuning in to catch, “--since eight, you’ve been at this a while. Break for tea?”

“Perfect.” He says solidly, though he doesn’t care much about the tea.

 

***

 

He is finally living up to his name. He feels like himself, in some ways more like himself than he ever has before. The world in ruins, a new one springing up at the touch of his hand (now he too must feel like god, mustn’t he?), and the only other person who matters back where he belongs, though not forgiven for his prodigality, or his hypocrisy. Unlike some, he isn’t fool enough to toss about the word ‘forgiveness’ lightly.

 

But he’s never won before. And he’s tense, sleeping with one eye open, waiting for the catch.

 

***

“Flavia told me you said a cosmos without me scarcely bore thinking about.” The Doctor was putting on the kettle, and he spat the sentence out from the kitchen in one long burst, afraid the Master would try to change the subject again before he could finish. In the dining room the object of the Doctor’s thoughts stiffened and put down his biscuit.

“Ah, my purple prose body. You know I actually thought Disraeli was a decent novelist back then?” The Master shook his head with largess. “How times do change. Now I admire the Beckett-esque simplicity of Teletubies. Communication as babble,” He gives his huge-eyed, serious nod to the Doctor, who’s come to stand in the doorway to the room, “How deep is  _that?_ ”

The Doctor, leaning against the wooden doorframe looking at him with this body’s expression of vulnerability mixed with intense interest and concern, makes an attractive picture. The Master itches to shut him up both to cut the conversation short and to reach out and enjoy that beauty, prove again that it’s his for the taking.

“You’re going to brush off possibly the most—” The Doctor turns on his heel and returns to the kitchen, exasperated. There’s an over-zealous rattling of mugs from his direction. “--and that’s just the thing, you said it about me, why didn’t you mention anything  _to_  me?” Typical of the Doctor to be comfortable, no, to  _prefer_  having his conversations  _about_  something through a fucking wall.

He’d liked everything rich and supple back then, the Master recalled. His favorite things had been the pile of velvet, the smell of thick clouds of incense, well-laid intrigue and the long, low wordless moan this Doctor gave when he came. He’d heard it only in two separate encounters, but then several times, and he’d remembered it well after.

He’d dizzied the Doctor with endless reversals, schemes and near-deadly encounters crafted like gifts-- subtle, appropriate exchanges between a master and his estranged favored one. It was nothing like now, now they were finally alone, and he was so completely victorious that pity and mockery glanced off him like false rumors.

These days he liked sharp suits and the smell of cold days, ruthlessly efficient plans and, as for this particular Doctor, the breathy, ratcheting little squeaks as he got closer and closer to coming, and finally how his very large, black-dilated eyes fluttered closed in satisfaction right after.

The doctor, alluring, back in the doorframe with his tongue caught in his teeth, shook his head.

“I just can’t imagine you saying that.”

“Oh can’t you.” the Master bristled, annoyed. “Well you’re in luck, whole new me, wouldn’t catch me driveling it now.” The Doctor simply looked confused, infuriatingly innocent, for a man he’d taken time and again in the most depraved ways he could imagine. Shouldn’t that leave some indelible mark, more permanent than bruises that faded and hurts that healed, shouldn’t it change him, alter him, forever and completely? Did it mean anything if it didn’t?

“If I’d died no one could have stopped you.”

“You,” he got up and paced to the window, leaning against it with both his forearms propped against the glass, looking down on his captured world, “Are an absolute idiot. And it’s not like you’re stopping me from much of anything right now, are you? More of a tea-boy than a Doctor. I think the kettle’s boiling, see to it, will you?”

“Turned it off so we could talk.”

“Oh, the oncoming drizzle must mean  _business,_  now he’s turned the stove off.”

“What did you mean then? If I’m being  _naïve_ ,” and he stretched the word out, annoyed at how many times the Master had accused him of just that in this body, “and assuming something you’re not capable of, then why would you--”

“I’ve been so impolite,” the Master cut him off, turning his back to the window. He held out a hand to the Doctor and beckoned. The Doctor obediently came forward and took it, only to be curled into an embrace.

“Terribly cruel.” The Master continued. His other hand deftly slipped under clothing to cup the Doctor’s arse. “I promised you this table some time ago, and we never did properly christen it. You’ll undress for me, won’t you? Undress for me.” The Doctor’s hands paused on the top button of his dress shirt, unsure. The Master’s eyes narrowed.

“When I tell you to do something for me, I expect it done.” The Doctor, blushing a bit with embarrassment, slowly unbuttoned the blue dress shirt, then letting it fall to the floor unmarked. Oh good boy. He unbuttoned his gray slacks and tugged down his pants slowly, stepping out of them and standing there, tense with anticipation, hands skimming over his stomach and thighs. So impossibly close.  _Look how pale he is,_  the Master marveled,  _the color of eggshells, and as fragile._

 

***

Forgiveness, an English word, which the Doctor taunted him with all that first year, which still lingers at the corners of that well-claimed mouth like a bruise that will not be kissed away, is appropriately enough an uncountable noun. It comes from the older Germanic ‘forgiefan’. A Time Lord can hardly hear a word without hearing what it has meant, and will mean—every word a writhing, dynamic creature fighting for semantic territory, relevance, and thus continued existence. ‘Forgiefan’ meant to give up. He cannot give up his knowledge of the Doctor’s crimes. So they get on well today. What of it. Nothing changes.

 

***

 

“Hop up on the table.” He swatted the Doctor’s arse. They had finished dinner, and he wanted to try this again, but differently. It had been a few weeks since they christened it. He’d had new thoughts on the subject since, wanted to run a few tests. He felt like he needs to get everything right, just perfect, while he still can.

The network was operational and the Toclafane had swarmed over two more sectors. But the satellites weren’t working very well on the reptilian anatomies of the natives even with his modifications (something to do with the midbrain, but it was tricky, and he could admit he wasn't not half the comparative anatomist the Rani was), and the casualty rates were necessarily higher than Earth’s. He was a bit impressed with the citizens of Aberous Prime’s 43% resistance rate. More, because reprisals increased resistance in the population. Well, as impressed as he could be with smouldering hunks of dead, if mentally competent, reptile.

The Doctor didn’t know the next wave has begun. The Master was careful to keep his mind clear whenever the Doctor might pick up on anything. He was wickedly amused that the Doctor was willing, eager, and never suspected that the hours in the lab of tinkering are idle refinements rather than necessary repairs. Why should he? The Master was an expert in manipulation, and he knew his mark so well. The Doctor, as usual, believed what he wanted to. While he could tell the Doctor the secret and watch his face crumple in like a singularity, he was enjoying this seduction. He was playing a long game.

Not that rape held no appeal-- there was such exquisite pleasure in forcing the Doctor, in making him feel his own cruelties ten-fold. It was a delicious repast. But hours later he was hungry again, for something he couldn’t readily define. It was good, it was all good, itwas always so incredibly right, that the Doctor should be here like this, submitting to him, desperate for him, as he should always be. And yet. When he took the Doctor, insistently, repeatedly, against the Doctor’s will, whether he gloried in the violation or forbid the Doctor to so much as think of it as anything of the kind, it left behind even more of that same hunger.

He made the Doctor tell him just who he belonged to until his voice cracked and his abused lips trembled with the litany of want and acceptance of his mastery, the liturgy of their savage service. But he knew he wouldn’t need to hear it said if it were simply true. The drums ran across his mind like heavy footsteps in an upstairs apartment. He was restless, edgy. He was not content, and as Master of All Things why, why shouldn’t he be enjoying his dominion, more satisfied than anyone he rules, blissfully fucking happy? He loved power simply for its own sake, but it should bring him its rewards, like a god to its devotees.

When the Doctor  _bounced,_ writhed on his cock and flung down his mental shields and told him with words and all the strength of his mind that it felt fucking fantastic to do this, to be here with him, all because he wanted to, the Master felt full, sated, and the drums eased, like the heaviness in the air clears after a storm. If he wanted to take the Doctor again soon, as he usually did, it felt like winning a prize for himself rather than fighting to pacify his drums.

But he taunted his pet perhaps a bit too harshly today, making a few cutting cracks at dear dead Romana’s expense, when perhaps he should have left that well enough alone (oh, but he never can stop picking at a problem, never leaves a wound to heal, and the Doctor had been so visibly fucking delighted when Romana returned from E-Space, made some comment to Runcible to that effect on the news on one of his rare visits back-- the Master had caught the broadcasts of her political rise while idly flicking through reports from home, it never hurt to be well informed, and he had seen the Doctor sitting beside her at some banquet as her escort, hand at the small of her back, laughing, and felt so disgusted the drums rose, god did he hate the sanctimonious little strawberry blonde bitch) and the Doctor is surprised and hurt and doesn’t feel like getting buggered on the dinner table just now.

The Doctor’s expression of put out confusion at being ordered to lie down (He could say ‘lie back and think of England,’ just as a casual little joke, if he felt like taking his old enemy while he wept, and maybe he’ll do that later, if the Doctor displeases him.) could launch a thousand relationship self-help manuals.

“Here comes the ‘you mutated my puppy’ face again, famed in song and story. I said table. Why aren’t spread out like a buffet already?”

With an annoyed twitch of his mouth the Doctor harrumphed off, laying down face first and gripping both edges with his hands. The Master rummaged in the sideboard, producing a bottle of lube and something he hasn’t gotten to try just yet.

Grinning, he palmed the grip, briefly grateful for unlamented Lucy’s typical upper-class childhood, complete with pony. He hadn’t had much respect for his dead wife’s possessions, still pilled in the unpacked boxes from their move to Downing Street. They’d been brought up with everything he actually had some use for in one complete haul and summarily chucked out of the Valliant’s executive suite like so much clutter to make room for the Doctor after Martha Jones was dead and the Master was sure of his success—seeing anything of Lucy’s tended to distress the Doctor to the point of being no fun at all.

But this was the baby in the bathwater, and the Doctor need never know where it came from. Giving it a bit of thought, he put on his black leather work gloves for the occasion—he knew how the Doctor had always liked those. He ran his new toy along the inside of the Doctor’s thighs.

“Is that-- but where did you even get a riding crop?!”

“Shut up. Wider.” He smirked, and bent to nuzzle the Doctor’s neck.

“Don’t sulk, you’re going to love this.” He pushed his weight onto the Doctor’s back, rubbing his hardening length between the soft, rounded, white globes of what had to be one of his favorite arses of the lot. The Doctor squeaked beneath him as his own untended cock rubbed against the frictionless lacquer table, providing him with teasing, unfulfilling stimulation. The Master chuckled unsympathetically. “Oh, you can’t get enough of me, can you?” The Doctor mewled angrily in response as he ground him into their breakfast table.

“And it’s a dressage whip.” He muttered petulantly into the crook of Doctor’s neck. “You’ll be able to tell ‘cause it’s longer.”

The Master used the crop to tap the Doctor’s spine at the nape of his neck, using the crop to trace down to the length of the spine to the pale swell of flesh he so admired. Giving it a considering look, he applied quick smacks in succession, enjoying the inevitable desperate little noises, the tension in the Doctor’s arms and the white-knuckled grip on the table’s edges as the Doctor tried to hold himself still.

He took his time appreciating the artistic loveliness of the red lines where the blood vessels have burst like bubble wrap against the snowy white surface. He had an eye for such displays. When they were teenagers he’d taken Theta bleeding in the snow outside the dome, where no one ever went but them, just to see his colors. Thete had been a living poem and he’d dared whine about being cold afterwards. The Doctor, the Master knew, had never really understood his own potential.

He was happy to act as a catalyst. He presented his gloved hands to the Doctor, who obediently griped the leather just above the fingertips in his teeth and pulled, one hand at a time. The Master set them down neatly, before reconsidering and stuffing one longwise in the Doctor’s mouth, wanting him to associate the taste with being well fucked.

 _What if I should want to talk?_  The Doctor was loud in his mind from all the points at which their bodies were connected.

“I encourage you,” he patted the Doctor on the cheek, “to beg me with your lovely thoughts. I want all the way in, Doctor.” The Doctor was strung tightly, legs trembling from the struggle of keeping himself upright. “It’ll be so, so good.” He promised, curling his fingers around the Doctor’s straining arms in a strange, backwards embrace. The Doctor thrust back up into him, as if charmed into obedience by his words, their lilting tone.

“That’s it, Doctor,” The Master all but cooed. “If you only tell me, I’ll give you what you need.” The Doctor spewed a series of gorgeous, garbled pleas into his mind. “There we are. My, Doctor, you’ve a filthy mind.” The Master tsked, and his smile was tight with pleasure.

The Master splattered lube over his now gloveless hand and worked his fingers around, then into the blonde Doctor’s entrance, which he now knew for a fact never been sampled by anyone but him. Now that the Doctor’s mind was his to riffle through he had satisfied himself on that issue, at least. He’d wondered, with more than a touch of jealousy, back when this fey, exceptionally attractive version of the Doctor was originally alive.

He thrust into the Doctor and simultaneously used his mind to soak the other Time Lord in waves of pleasure that hit at the same time as his thrusts, the better to accentuate them. Though outwardly passive the Doctor’s own mind was hard at work, sinking hooks into the Master’s and pulling, wrapping the force with which he demanded more of the Master, unity, in liquid and rich thoughts.  _Spread further,_  the Master demanded, and the Doctor readily obliged.

The Master whipped the crop back to the front of the Doctor’s throat, holding it with one hand on either side of the Doctor’s head and bending the Doctor backwards like a bow, gagging him a bit, even as his hips pistoned into the other Time Lord and fucked him solidly into the surprisingly sturdy table. Feeling close he threw the crop aside with an audible clatter, pressed the Doctor fully down into the table and rode him. Close, but not quite what he wanted today. He was testing still, and he needed this to be exactly right.

The Master pulled out, eliciting a startled mental flurry of desperate need from the Doctor that did wonders for his ego, flipped the Doctor around, shoved him fully up onto the table and pushed in again, deeper still. The Doctor’s hands alternately gripped at his waist and pulled at his buttocks. He stared at the Doctor’s flushed face with its rapidly fluttering eyes and absently moving mouth, half filled with his glove (which he’d get back with the pleasant addition of little crescent-moon teeth marks), producing meaningless, pleased little shapes, so totally gone, as he shared with the Doctor’s mind the live feed of how beautifully he was taking all of this, how his broken cries, split around the glove like waves hitting the shore, rang like bells.

The Master gave him the sensory information of how very exquisitely tight he felt, his glorious, willing, wanton Doctor, how nothing else ever felt quite this good, how next time he thought he’d fuck him a little with the whip first, would he like that? And the Doctor actually _screamed_  around the glove in his mouth and came so hard he blacked out, the Master riding his unconscious form a few more strokes before coming himself, singing out the Doctor’s name as he never would have if he were awake to hear it.

While the Doctor was unconscious he enjoyed the idea of his semen deep within the Doctor, violating the pale, fragile, too-good little body, sleeping beneath him like a debauched rent boy after a hard night’s work, or a ruined bride. But no metaphor was quite so satisfying to him as the actuality of the Doctor, starting to stir beneath him while the Master was still inside him. Pinned butterfly, if anything, slain and lovely.

***

He is afraid that forgiving the Doctor, even now that he’s his, would mean giving up the wariness. And if being constantly on guard keeps him from fully enjoying his victory, it also keeps him from loosing it.

 

***

 

In bed one night when they’d both finished the Doctor simply stared at him, tracing his hands over the Master’s torso, his thighs, the root of his cock, brushing his own entrance a bit when he did so, and the Master shivered at the deliberateness in his touch, the way the Doctor moaned very softly when he came to the place they were joined. Slowly the Master rubbed the cum splattered across the Doctor’s stomach into the skin, making that taunt flesh glimmer in the room’s muted light, and licked his hand clean when he was done.

The Doctor moved on to spanning the Master’s back with his hands, feeling out the juxtapositions. This is bone, that muscle, here was skin. Memorizing. He rested his hands on the back of the Master’s neck, performing the same devoted geometry, and the Master was not afraid, not even in the most basic animal way despite all his machinations to make that an untenable plan, that the Doctor would twist and snap it.

***

He is afraid of forgiving the Doctor even when the Time Lord swells under him, needy and desperate, because without that central fleck of distrust and remembered cruelty in the dark glass marble of his consciousness, he is not quite the same man.

 

***

“It’s so different.” The Doctor gave expression to a long silence. He spoke with caution, because they’d hithero avoided mentioning this, and the topic felt charged to him. They were just post victory-fuck (to celebrate the Master’s successful creation of a climate network for Earth, to better simulate Gallifrey’s atmospheric phenomena—the Doctor could hardly begrudge this triumph now, with the conquest of Earth long de facto). He’d been his fifth self for weeks and weeks, and it was a welcome respite from the constant changes that had made him feel like he would rip apart and never knit whole again. He knew he was only resting up, just holding this form until the Master was satisfied he wouldn’t accidentally break his favorite toy, but the Doctor was grateful all the same.

“This is what it must feel like for you, going through all my regenerations.” He referred to the odd, new pleasures of being with this shorter, smooth faced version of his lover. The Master shrugged lazily.

“You’re in my mind, in the moment, you know what it feels like for me.” It’s not quite true, or the Doctor would know about the Toclafane and be a good deal less pliant, but the Master wanted the Doctor to think he had full access. He pushed false frustration about the project stalling to the front of his mind whenever they touched and let the Doctor sneak looks and come away satisfied.

“The last time, you were so different.” The Master frowned and recalled having had dark hair, a single, stolen heart and a Cheshire grin. A ghost of the old smirk reappeared as he recalled how, sometime after that medieval farce, he cajoled the Doctor into having a drink with him when they ‘happened’ to run into each other on a galactic rim planet, and from there… and once before that in a cave, sheltering from sensor sweeps that couldn’t get through the rock’s interference, waiting out the night hiding from the junta behind the time vortex-highwaymen scheme they’d both stumbled onto, the Doctor’s feeble protests giving way to his insistence.

He ran a finger across the Doctor’s lower lip, toying with the soft pink flesh, still blood-rich and dark from their exertions. The Doctor’s lids were heavy, his expression warm and lazy. The Master pushed aside the complicated, dark knot of resentment he attached to those encounters in his mind. He chose to think on the now, the prize here with him rather than the one he lost.

“In what way?” He’d never been averse to hearing all about himself from the Doctor’s lovely mouth.

“No rubbish beard scratching at me, for one.” The Master swatted the Doctor lazily.

“A proper beard makes one look distinguished.”

“If you understand the meaning of the word ‘distinguished’ to be roughly the same as ‘satanic.’”

“I seem to remember you enjoying your corruption at the time.” The Doctor blushed, rather remarkable considering the come still slicking his stomach, which thoroughly undermined the whole ‘virgin modesty’ thing he seemed determined to go for.

“Rough stone cave, rain pouring outside, now that was lovely.” The Master mused. “We should go camping. Indulge your Dido fixation—not the singer, obviously, I’m not compromising on the grounds of taste here.” The Doctor chuckled, vibrating pleasantly around him.

 

***

  
As if the Doctor has some monopoly on forgiveness. He could write an epic on the Doctor’s sins, and the Doctor never thinks to ask for pardon. He dares give it, like he gives his disgusting pity, like he gives his attention to anything and everything that catches his flighty, nigh whorish, magpie interest. He gives so, it’s a wonder the well of him hasn’t run dry.

 

***

“Bet you’d love that, wouldn’t you?” The Master gave a silky grin. The talk after a frantic evening encounter had turned into a joke about dying of exhaustion that the Master’s took rather too seriously for the Doctor’s taste. “Me reforming inside you, shaping to your contours like water fills a cup.” He leaned down and thrust shallowly, without intent, but as an illustration, dripping the impossible scenario like a honeyed endearment, “I’d be born into the world squeezed like a vice. You’d come instantly. The first thing I’d know would be you, impossibly tight and cool on my burning skin, wringing me dry.” He began to whisper heatedly. “I’ll be in your mind too, and I’ll tear you to bits and put you back together. God it’ll be good. Best way to go.”

The Doctor shivered, not entirely as horrified by the idea as he should be, while still a little terrified of the Master’s switch from the conditional to the future tense. No one ever frightened him with quite the Master’s flair. Tampering with regeneration like that was hugely taboo, beyond perverse. One shouldn’t even be touched during the most insular biological act. And yet the heat and the energy would burst through his veins like Greek fire. His mind would quake with the burst of change and know such sweetness as the artron energy blanketed and restored it. They would be so impossibly close.

***

When the Master was younger he prayed to hate the Doctor. In his desperation he’d called on gods he’d never believed in. Gallifrey had gods once, before their mortals were as mighty as ever their own imaginations had been.

 

It worked. The Master had loathed the Doctor with a hate as pure, as consuming and bright as a mighty distant star.

 

And hating him brought no relief. The Master had to laugh then, with a germ of madness in the sound that time would tend into a garden. He was rich and complicated in his insanity, impermeable, capriciously inviting in the way of psychopaths, multi-layered and dangerous as a jungle.

 

He was mad in so many ways, and he was mad for so many reasons, after so long a life. And if the drums were the warp of it, then everything else was the weft.  _Cure you,_  the Doctor said, arrogant enough to believe that if he hacked away the Master’s insanity there would be anything recognizable left.

 

***

“I liked it when you used to let me inside you on occasion.” The Doctor remembered that intimacy from his encounters with the Master’s predecessor. “I mean, I loved it, rather. Being with you like that.” He paused. Their private life was inconsequential, he supposed, in the vast, teeming universe. It would be just a small, beautiful event. Knowing that it was irrelevant from any wider perspective whether the Master made this small concession didn’t make him want the Doctor any less. “This is beyond good, but you don’t  _ever_  let me--” He swallowed. It was odd dinner conversation, but he wanted to know. It couldn’t be just because he was technically a captive. They were always somewhat more versatile than this. It had been bothering him. “Do you not like it this time?”

There’s little he could do about it if the Master’s current incarnation just got nothing from the act, but oh god, was that hard to believe. Especially considering the smirking, condescending Master of the Doctor’s past’s utter triumph when his taunting had finally caused the Doctor to snap through his moral misgivings and tackle his enemy to the dirt floor of a cave.

They’d taken their time and not slept that night, explored their repertoire of old favorites, most of which included the Master exercising the control. While the Master might have bitched the next morning about black velvet showing dust far too well in the face of the Doctor’s violent self-recrimination he hadn’t said a word against the long, slow fuck the Doctor had started with.

“Can we try it?” The Doctor doesn’t want to beg but he hears the edge in his own voice.

Centuries ago the morning sunlight had hit the Doctor like a bucket of cold water and a hard slap in one. The first thing he’d said when he’d remembered his voice was an angry “Where’s my jumper?” The second, precipitating a long line of similar comments, odd because the Doctor was never that prone to profanity, was a quiet “What the fuck have I done?”

“Maybe.” The Master says, but he means no. The last time he offered himself to the Doctor on that level he’d expected more than his partner’s disgusting self-recriminations in the morning and an uncompromising resumption of hostilities. To let himself—and only to be dismissed by the little swot, oh, or better yet, pitied. He didn’t know what he had hoped for, but he should have known better than to trust in the Doctor’s decency to him. He’d learned this lesson while they were still in their first bodies, or at least he should have. Nothing changed.

“Don’t touch me, don’t you fucking touch me again—I-- I’m sorry. This is as much my fault as yours.” “I can’t forget what you—do you even know how many people—do you even remember anymore?” “God, you probably think this is funny.” “This didn’t happen.” The Master knew the Doctor’s lines, could prompt him if the Doctor missed his cues.

He remembered the Doctor saying things when he came, not much earlier, that the Master hadn’t heard in centuries. The Doctor was either inordinately capable of lying to him, or exceedingly good at acting against his own feelings. And such a man was more false than the Master, veiled in disguises and subtleties, was. Because he pretended to be so good. So honest.

But the Doctor, whatever good he’d done, was also that sneer of disgust and shudder of revulsion. The Doctor was the sight of a slim blonde man walking away through a rainstorm into patrolled enemy ground, outline dissipating until he vanished into the thick mist, because he couldn’t bear the Master’s proximity or his own shame.

He’d gotten the Doctor drunk in some backwater he’d lured the Doctor’s senile old TARDIS to and had him again, just to punish him. The Master had thoroughly enjoyed himself. But it wasn’t enough and he didn’t feel much better afterward, slipping out to avoid accusations of use and consent and betrayal from the Doctor, as if he could talk, and questions of why he didn’t just smash that deceitful mouth wide open and break that fair-boned skull into grisly bits at long, long last from himself.

The Master could lie too, just like him. Just like that. Oh but he was even better at it. He stroked the Doctor’s hair and kissed the contact point on his temple softly. The Doctor was half human, and his other people, who the Master would never understand, betray each other in this way.

“Maybe someday soon we can try that.”

And some time later, when weeks have passed with nothing of the kind, the Doctor would bring it up after a deliciously long internal debate over whether to say anything, how best to go about it. He would have chosen and waited for the perfect time. It would be a gentle suggestion, a plea. It would mean so much to him.

The Master needed the Doctor to know that revenge tastes like burnt sugar, like the thin skin of it crystallized on top of Crème Brule. He liked Crème Brule—enjoyed the tiny, pristine white ramekins designed just and only for this, loved the bright crack when he brought the belly of the spoon down on that sweet, brittle outer shell. Time Lords were as a rule inordinately fond of parallels.

The Master will laugh in the Doctor’s face and ask the other Time Lord if he really he thought he had any intention of letting the Doctor do that to him. He would tell the Doctor at length how much the thought revolts him, and explain who’s Master here. The Doctor will feel mocked and unwanted and deeply hurt. Being him, he’d cry, and tremble with impotent anger when the Master licked the tears off and took him so harshly he limped the next day, just to show him how it’s done. And that’s going to feel like balm to a wound, like hot revenge, just so, so good.

_I win._

 

***

 

 

“You don’t have to do anything.” The Doctor was whispering, though there was no one alive to hear them. “May I kiss you?” He ran his tongue along the shell of the Master’s ear, dropping words into it directly, lips touching skin, almost placing the syllables there.

“Like this?” He wondered aloud, moving to lick the hollows of the Master’s neck, leaving wet trails to mark where he’d been and guide him back to try the touches all over again, like a trail of breadcrumbs.

“And like this?” He swiped his tongue across the Master’s open mouth, innocent and teasing and guileless. Wordlessly, the Master nodded. The Doctor worked quickly to unbutton the Master’s crisp dress shirt, but didn’t push it off his shoulders or remove the slim black tie.

“Would you like to sit down, Master?” The Doctor asked, carefully, and the Master ran his tongue along his teeth, considering, then walked backwards, leading the Doctor by the hand and never breaking contact, until he was sitting down in the swivel chair, the Doctor kneeling before him.

The Doctor placed his hands over each of the Master’s hearts and went in for another kiss, before parting the shirt like a silk curtain protecting a precious old painting and drawing a deliberate line with his mouth down the divide that creates symmetry in the muscles of his chest.

The Doctor paused to give the Master’s navel a chaste kiss, reminded by the little hollow of birth and life. It’s a quaint feature on a regeneration of a loomed body. Unlike him the Master was never connected to anyone in that way, never so intimately dependent.

“I’m so happy,” he admitted, for the first time, to the flesh directly before him, that cannot look at him with scorn or judgment, “That you’re alive. That you survived. That it was you.” And forestalling any comment the Master might have made, he seized the other Time Lord’s swollen, bobbing erection and squeezed just on the right side of pain, holding it with both hands almost reverently. He kissed the blood-heavy tip, quickly licking away the bright pre-come, before lowering his head to tongue the Master’s inner thigh. He bit just a bit and smiled contentedly at the other’s hitched breath because it was just as the Master liked it when he did this in this body centuries ago, just as the Doctor remembered.

And he did remember that night. He wondered if he and the Master could have come to some better understanding if he’d stayed and talked, despite how impossible it had seemed as the rain washed off the sweat and the sticky remains of the night. He’d wanted, treacherous as Lot, to turn around for one last look. Better yet he’d wanted to run back.

The Doctor wondered the same of their initial parting, all their subsequent encounters, that invitation to rule when their bodies were older and hearts much younger. His refusal was right, obviously, the Doctor was no emperor, but it could have been given as alternative rather than a denial. Would “I’ll come with you if you stop,” while obviously prompting the Master’s mockery, have at least opened the discussion back then? It wouldn’t now.

The Doctor wanted to say he’d made mistakes. They shared blame for what had happened. For one of the few times in his long life he’d have liked to take responsibility and apologise. But the Master had no use for the Doctor’s regrets, his childish angst, his pathetic conviction of his own importance. The Master would say that it had meant nothing to him, that the Doctor meant little more. Maybe it had. Maybe he did. The Doctor didn’t want to hear it. He lived off hope these days, that a stall would become a de facto end to expansionism. That the Master could be satiated, could change.

So instead he grabbed the Master’s arse, which was obligingly lifted off the chair at his touch. The Doctor fed himself the Master’s cock, mouthing the whole length, closing his lips at the root and hollowing his cheeks. The Master’s hands dropped to his hair automatically to guide him, but the Doctor wanted to do this himself. He looked up, catching the Master’s eyes with his own as he mumbled out a “Please, Master,” around the hardness that fills his mouth. This particular combination of sight and sound and feel had just made the Master’s list of favorite things.

***

 

If he knew how to be happy, he would call this fulfillment. But he was waiting for it all to come crashing down around him. He could hear the flood swelling behind the straining dams. He had built the levies himself, and knew they were impenetrable.

 

And yet.

 

And yet.

 

***

 

He won’t be used, won’t be a slave to the hit of pleasure he gets when, without prompting, staring at his face so he can be sure he’s understood, poised on his cock, licking his lips shyly before, every time, the Doctor says three words when he comes that have only the barest conceptual relation to forgiveness.

And they do feel good to hear, even if his own lips and mind never respond. And the Doctor’s voice and mind giving them back to him like a long-awaited birthright are certainly convincing. But the Doctor’s lied before. And the Master’s older and stronger and unconvinced by the pleasant obedience. It is what he wants, and the Doctor knows it. All the peace of the past days, all the cheerful subservience.

“Oh Master, Yes Master,” and he needn’t necessarily believe a word of it. Those sycophantic humans had enjoyed the Doctor’s loyalty more consistently than the Master. And less deservedly by miles. The Doctor would do anything to save the lives of those faceless millions. Even him.

 

***

 

In the straining of the water against the levies, he can hear them. The water swells with their rhythm, their waves lick seductively at his defenses in their old, accustomed time. He knows this is not a solution. When you build on low ground you will eventually be flooded out, in centuries or seconds. The end is ever the same. Precautions and defenses just buy time. They are little lies you tell yourself.

 

***

 

The Master thought this was all rather surreal. After all the madcap scrabbling about trying to build empires and save civilizations and catch each other, after all the unspeakable things they’d said to each other and the unthinkable things they’d done, here they both were, simply huddled on a couch with the telly on. Well, on spaceship floating above the frankly magnificent desiccated remains of Earth-cum- the capital of the New Time Lord Empire after a hard day’s organization thereof and tired after the best blowjob in recent memory and a bout of enthused, marvelously dirty sex on a UN conference table.

But still! Telly! On a couch! Them! Did this count as cuddling? Was he actually—the Doctor scooted into him, readjusting to pillow his head on the Master’s shoulder with a small, contented squirmy motion. Well, if that didn’t kill that internal debate dead. He flicked through the channels idly, pausing briefly on the eerily hypnotic children’s programming from Kazhik 9, with its brightly colored plasmavores running about cheerfully sucking the blood from comically distressed babyfaced humanoids.

“Didn’t you used to have that coat?” The Master pointed to the most sartorially offensive plasmavore accusingly. Indeed, there was an eerie resemblance. “Add a kitschy cat pin and he’s going as you for a fancy dress party.”

“Eugh, change the station. You’re being terribly cruel, just because you always went monochrome doesn’t mean you can make me stare into the patchwork nightmare that is my past.”

“We all have to face the consequences of our decisions, Doctor,” The Master intoned mock-severely, but obligingly flicked through the channels, coming to a somewhat interesting dramatization of the war preceding the Shadow Proclamation.

“Very Shakespeare,” the Doctor said approvingly when he lingered. The Master rolled his eyes but put down the remote. They took turns playing spot the historical inaccuracy, and came up with a more interesting story for the Genushian delegate complete with running jokes. The Doctor even got the Master to grudgingly admit that some of the dialog had been rather good. Though he didn’t explicitly say it, he probably wanted the Master to reconsider his intention to invade the telenovel’s planet of origin in the next push.

About a third of the way through the Doctor slipped his hand into the Master’s of his own accord, idly running small circles across the cool skin. The drums were muted almost to silence, and the Master was surprised that he wasn’t furious with himself for being so placid. When the program finished the Doctor grabbed the remote and handed it to the Master without leaving his side.

“Do we happen to get GSS, in addition to these local channels?” The Doctor asked, prompting the Master to scoff.

“Of course we have standard satellite—what do you think we are, poor?” Well, point of fact the Master was stealing his cable just on principle, but there was no need to let the Doctor know that. If there’d still been a BBC licensing fee he wouldn’t have paid as a point of honor.

“The Argolins have a surprisingly good cricket program.” The Doctor prompted with a casual, academic tone that in no way fooled the Master, who rolled his eyes.

“You’re just noting this in the spirit of detached interest, I’m sure.”

“Well I was thinking we happen to be about in temporal confluence with--”

“What you’re trying and failing to say is that there’s a match on.”

“Er, yes. That’s the jist.”

With a long suffering sigh the Master taped his way to the index, found the stupid sodding cricket match in question, and settled in for an exceptionally dull evening.

“You own me two hours of willing-- no, positively  _cheerful_ \-- extraordinarily kinky bondage fun for every hour I have to spend watching indolent people with funny hair run between sticks on a pitch.” One of the batmen got into a polite dicker with the umpire over a bodyline bowl that promised to take forever and another sixty years of the Master’s subjective time. The Doctor watched the conflict avidly, probably even Forming An Opinion. “I mean it, I’m going to take over your nervous system and puppeteer you into sucking me off until you pass out, see if I don’t!”

“Argolins play by something like ODI rules--”

“They what?” The Master knew little about arguably the universe’s most inane sport, and mildly resented the Doctor for what little he did know about the lamest pastime since staring at walls, purely through once making the mistake of asking what in Rassilon’s name the Doctor was wearing this regeneration when he’d gotten him alone and drunk (Or ‘squithy,’ as the Doctor had referred to himself— this version had a bit of an Edwardian thing.). What was supposed to be the satisfaction of a minor, if nagging, question, turned into a drunken soliloquy, which he’d finally had to silence by surprising the Doctor with a sudden onslaught of hot mouth on his. And  _deja vu_ , the Doctor was, once again, still on about bloody cricket.

“—So for our purposes, I mean they play a one-day game-- really though I do miss the traditional full version-- so that’s what, forty-eight hours of being happily at your disposal?” The Doctor gave a cheeky grin without looking away from his riveting cricket action. “Sounds like a lovely weekend. On that note you should either synthesize or pop out for some more lube. We’re running low; unless you have a secret lube closet you’ve never seen fit to tell me of or somesuch. I dunno, you might. Evil lube, perhaps.” He patted the Master’s knee affectionately, turning it into a bit of a stroke.

“Don’t want to chafe, old sp—Oh! Oh that’s illegal, you scamp, why is no one calling—oh there he goes.” An umpire made his disapproving way over to the object of the Doctor’s ire. Mollified, he turned back to the Master. “And if they had anything flavored, you do tend to keep me in that skinny idiot version a fair bit, and this last batch all taste like petroleum—functional, but a bit boring. Not the  _you_  element, naturally, that’s pretty sort of marvelous, it’s just that I recall thinking two nights ago that if we got a variety I could have, well, kiwi!you, mango!you, or what have you. I was too preoccupied to mention at the time.”

The Master was giving him the most gob-smacked look a man of his incredible natural poise had at his disposal, and the Doctor, feeling a rush of fondness, kissed him on the cheek. “Thanks, love.” And settled back down for, fingers crossed now, 50 solid overs.

 

***

If everything held, and remained as it was then, he might outlast this. He would always hear the water, and it would haunt his days, but he could live like that—he’d suffered far, far worse degradations. But he could never help pushing, could never leave well enough alone. An empire without expansion is a joke. A man who loves you conditionally isn’t really yours at all.

 

***

When it came it was innocuous. The Master hadn’t really remembered how small these things could be. The heinous softness of terrible moments. He’d groused about a problem in the Valliant’s shields. That was all.

After the creation of the new climate system he’d moved the Valliant to a higher cruising altitude to avoid turbulence—lord knows he didn’t want the precious, finicky paradox machine jarred by a rouge lightening bolt because the climate control system was experiencing teething troubles. Now they could see stars ringing the ship, properly with no clouds to interfere, as Time Lords should.

The current apparatus allowed high-velocity particles, the remnants of space junk that hit the upper atmosphere and splintered, through the net surrounding the ship. This pitted and weakened the surface. A fuel tank had blown, and while it was no great catastrophe the Master was exceptionally preoccupied with maintaining his life precisely as it was (winning, in every way winning), shoving his fingers in dikes with alacrity, and this unexpected mishap annoyed him disproportionately. He hadn’t realized the shields were so poorly designed and he cursed himself for relying on 20th century earth engineers even for what was admittedly a nonessential system.

Extending the net to fill every crack and cranny was simply impractical. It would have been a massive energy drain on the system.

“Malcar’s the only place in this time frame I can think of off the bat that produces a system that would suit. The principle’s an adjustable beam sweep with motion sensors. It’s brilliant. Bit of a bother for us to manufacture ourselves out of the Valliant’s office supplies and the planet’s raw resources though.” The Doctor noted, sliding his arms around his captor, putting in a casual bid for the planet’s continued survival by virtue of its convenience, complete with a manipulative physical component.

At times like this the Master was almost proud of having so clearly reshaped his old enemy in his own image. But he was simultaneously disgusted by the attempt, annoyed that whatever intimacy they had was undercut. Every touch was at some level administered clinically, to fix him, or on the understanding that people didn’t die when he was kept happy. It made the Master a little sick that the Doctor was whoring himself, and all for a race the Master had already eliminated in the last push. He was never simply and explicitly the Master’s.

Shit. Was the Doctor touching his skin when he thought that?

A glace down at the trembling hand being lifted from his stomach, a contact so light the Master hadn’t been aware of it, like his skin was the pin of a grenade, settled that question. Another one up at the wide, stricken blue eyes that had stopped focusing on anything, dilated, dumb, and non-responsive to motion completely derailed the Master’s plans to spend the day on his latest home-improvement scheme.

He’d known one day they would touch and he wouldn’t be expecting it and couldn’t cover fast enough. But he couldn’t really see past that enough to plan well for it.

***

Of course he tried to threaten the humans at the very first, back with the Doctor’s fifth body was still somewhat coherent. The Doctor hadn’t eaten for two days running, hadn’t spoken, and the Master had been more than generous, allotting him over-ample time to recover from the shock.

“You’re killing people anyway.” The Doctor’s lip had quirked, almost a spasm, almost a smile. He started speaking and couldn’t stop, slurring like a drunk, words slopping out of that elegant, witty mouth, uncontrolled, uncharacteristic, horrifying. “What does anything I do matter? I’d thought I might be enough. If I did everything. If I gave you everything I thought you might stop. But that’s too noble—I wanted to do it. I was enjoying this, I was happy-- and there’s nothing left of me. And you took me while they died. And nothing matters. I’m dumber than your Lucy, it took me so much longer to realize. Whole centuries I wanted to save you. I mourned you so many times.”

The Master kneels down to be at eye level with the Doctor, who’s slumped against the wall looking at nothing. He turns the Doctor’s chin towards his own and leans forward so their foreheads touch. Not telepathic invasion, but the explicit threat of it.

“I’ll burn them alive if you don’t stop this infantile sulking and eat. I’ll boil a transport ships’ coolant systems and let a big ol’ slave galley en route to one of the new industrial colonies, full of kiddies and mums and dads who just love each other so very, very much, get so hot those darling little monkeys of yours cook in their skins. All those sentient minds reduced to meat because you couldn’t be bothered to play nice.”

“I’m sorry.” The Doctor’s glazed eyes stare at nothing. “For all the times. I’m sorry. Does that matter?” The Master winces at the Doctor’s state (Is he sorry for all the times the Master took him? For failing the humans? For pushing the Master to this place?), but rallies with fresh threats.

“I’ll make you watch it, too, if you don’t get up, walk to the table, eat your goddamn steak and chips and thank me for the privilege.”

He didn’t want to pull out the big guns, when it was so unsubtle and he’d thought he’d had the Doctor somewhat better trained that this, but two days had worn on the Master. He was on edge for not having touched his toy for the longest period in years, bored, worried (though he’d die with the slave ship before admitting it), lonely (ditto on the death), and furious with himself for slipping up at all. Such an inconsequential thought. He’d hidden it for months. One fucking time!

“I am not going to collaborate.” The Doctor seemed to come back to himself a little.

“Pull your Emeline Pankhurst impression to your heart’s content, but I’m not indulging this sad little martyr complex you’ve developed.” The Master sneered, stalking off to remote-access the ship’s controls and bring it within visual range—a delay that would take some hours, even with the ships’s anachronistic post-post-lightspeed drive.

“Remember that you don’t suffer alone, baby Jesus.” The Master sat back and waited, rubbing his chin as if pondering, wishing, not for the first time, for a beard to stroke— this new form just wasn’t up to the challenge of good solid facial hair.

“Though the people you’re about to sentence to death do say misery loves company. That would certainly explain your endless train of companions. Maybe one of them’s even on board?” If only Peri weren’t off doing the Xena thing, the Master would have paid to see her get hers. ‘I’m Perpugilliam Brown!’ indeed. “It’d be random chance, so let’s not get too terrible excited, but wouldn’t that be a treat? You’d get to positively wallow in the guilt on this one, and I know how you just eat this kind of thing up. After dinner you can read me  _The Tell-Tale Heart_ and have a nice suby cry about the inescapability of our misdeeds. Sound fun?”

“Do you think that you love me?” The Doctor, finally looking at him, cut through the nervous, aggressive buzz of his one-man show like a siren through a still night.

The Master stared at him too surprised to speak. His body tensed and his eyes widened as if he were being physically attacked.

“Do you,” The Doctor repeated with piercing clarity, “think,” the word thick, the k popped out with exaggerated precision, as if mocking the word, “that you love me?”

“Shut up.” The Master hissed involuntarily, only realizing that he’d spoken when the Doctor gave him that same little seizure of a smile.

“You don’t know what you want enough for that. You don’t even know how to do it. I’d almost call you content some days, nearly fond of me, and then in an instant you’re vicious and deliberately, pointlessly cruel. You’ve sliced me open just to watch me bleed, and I let you because I thought-- it’s not a game to you, you really do just hate me that much. You can’t even be content with one version of me. You want to unravel me and,” The Doctor swallowed around a lump in his throat, “Fuck me and make a parody of me and bleed me dry. Like a cancer in my cells. I’ve spent so long wondering if I could have done something, ruing that I didn’t stay, that I couldn’t save you. I was  _right_ to run. This isn’t love. This isn’t  _anything_.”

With an inarticulate cry the Master, who’d watched the other man talk himself into hysterics, launched himself at the Doctor, slamming his gentle, blond head with its distant, patrician face down into the floor until there was blood on his hands and his white shirt and most especially that fucking face and the Doctor was alive (he knows enough to stop himself even now) but unconscious and he’d shut up shut _**up**_ **.**

When the Master was aware of a world outside the drums again the transport ship had been waiting for some time. The Doctor, face unwashed, nose most definitely broken, was standing at the window, seeming to just observe it. The Master struggled to his feet and got to the controls before suspicion overtook him. Walking shakily over to the Doctor he slapped his palm to a bloody temple and ripped out what he wanted to know with nothing like his usual finesse.

The Doctor has been using Archangel. The people on the ship were in a kind of trance, not terrified and confused as they should be but one and all cocooned in the Doctor’s reassurances. They bathed in his hope—the man who not long ago was babbling that nothing mattered had recovered his characteristic illogical compassion. The passengers were content, languid, so relaxed they wouldn’t even be able to feel they were dying.

The Doctor had poured almost all his energy into cradling them, almost all of himself. He planed to absorb and process all the pain, the agony of several hundred deaths, and the Doctor knew perfectly well it would reduce his brain to nothing. He’d die, and it would be an awful way to end.

The Master sent the humans back on course to their industrial colony instead, to live out their squalid, worthless lives, courtesy of a man they’ve never met and don’t even know to thank. The Doctor slipped out of their minds slow as treacle, leaving no trace, not even the memory of his name, just the afterimage of a blissful feeling that would remain with them as they struggled to survive in some desolate mineral-rich hell.

The Doctor and the Master stared at the star field in the last companionable silence they would share for months.

“Don’t touch them to get at me,” The Doctor said, finally. “I’ll die with them in a heartsbeat. Before you can so much as cut off the feed.” The Master didn’t say anything. He was too spent for rage.

He wondered if the Doctor had considered this option before, and had been waiting for the provocation and opportunity, or if he was simply thinking on his feet. But the Master didn’t doubt he’d do it. The Master considered threatening people at a safe distance, but dismissed it. He realized the Doctor would force down his rage over deaths he couldn’t control, getting ever sicker for it. The other Time Lord was done pretending the world consisted of them alone.

 

 

***

The Vortex can’t make anything. It’s part of time. Time only allows what’s already inherent in a to thing develop. Flower. Wither. It can offer up the circumstances that shape us, but it is neither the parameters nor the substance of things.

 

The Doctor was already evasive, afraid of responsibility, afraid of failing anyone or thing to which he was permanently committed. That was a terror that grew in tandem with all his love like a sick shadow. And the Doctor was born otherwise brave and curious and giving, born to explore and aid and never to stay for fear he would let someone down.

 

The Master was already insatiable, and sure of what he wanted. And if the vortex showed him a future where he was powerless and alone, and he clawed at the prophecy, trying to change it, to seize the power denied him, and tried too desperately, too forcefully, to bind his chosen to him, and if in doing so he brought the prophecy to fulfillment, well, it was going to happen anyway, wasn’t it.

 

 


	7. Quarks Do What Quarks Should; or The Love Songs of Monsters

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the Master gets what he always wanted and Six is uncharacteristically subdued.

Quarks do what quarks should, and if you’ve been to a very special school (and you’re out of luck if you haven’t because it’s quarks now itself, or not even that) you can watch them do it, observe their position and velocity simultaneously, really get to know the excitable little buggers.

 

They are part and parcel of a chair, which does what it should, simple and dependable and quite chair-like. A good solid frame all covered with leather. It rolls and swivels-- which a chair  _should_  do if at all possible, in his opinion-- providing a platform for his dramatic twists and reveals. A stage if you like (all the world _is_  a stage—his, specifically), for him, the consummate performer. He sits in it facing his audience.

 

Speaking of the world it too does what it should. Its ecosystem was already so near cataclysm before he touched it, hovering like the humans’ Humpty Dumpty on a wall. He does so love the teeter and crash of breaking things. Earth adapts charmingly to his purposes. The planet suckles on the changes he’s made like a hungry infant. It wants novelty and care and more, always more of what only he can provide (so like the Doctor, its lost son). It’s so young, this world, nothing like home. But it will be. Soon enough.

 

Already combines seed the plains with remnants of a dead world. The glass of the city domes grows itself with electrical energy fed to it by his weather system, inspired by some sea glass he’d had the luck to find (back when he was companioned by more than silence). This time the central citadel (In London, in the end—he can make his own damn mountains) is made of load bearing translucent concrete threaded with optical fibers to let in the sunlight (from its two suns now, even, and when he walks the ground he casts a double shadow and thinks it  _right_ ). This is a dome that won’t shatter and burn. It’ll do what it  _should_  do. They’ll be safe there.

 

(But Skaro on the eve of the creation of the Dalek had two such domed cities, not as sophisticated as this, but discomfortingly similar. They fell. He knows that. He knows the Doctor also knows. But still not a word, not a scathing remark, not a moralistic commentary, not a doubt. He would have killed for this lack of discord, once upon a time. He did, or he tried to— it never worked till now.)

 

The sullen core of the planet remains as ever, all the wrong minerals, stubbornly incorrect, and hard  _to_  correct (But he would draw them down to a thin, malleable wire stretching to the periphery of his empire just to hear that silenced voice scream his name again. He would bring the iron and nickel at the heart of this pathetic world to the edge of their ductility to get so much as a whisper, if he thought it would work.) .

 

The world’s been grafted over in nostalgia and indisputably genius technology and the eternal performer doesn’t distinguish between substance and content as well as he might. If the world wasn’t always Gallifrey and never will have been, there’s no one to say so. No one but them. Well. Him, effectively.

 

And the empire! It does what it should with remarkable grace. He’d say it seemed too easy if it hadn’t been so long in coming. The satellites broadcast and the people bow and those who don’t burn and for once his minions do as they’re told and don’t so much as think of crossing him. And why should they, when he gives them everything they want, spoils them rotten with so many different screams resonating from so many alien throats in a glutinous swan song of biological diversity. He’s a good father, and provides a feast for them. But you know growing children, never full.

 

His audience alone does not do what he should. The Doctor is blind to his accomplishments and deaf to his conversation. And it’s amazing how this one cog slipping out of alignment brings everything to a crashing halt. He knows, he  _knows_  he is a watchmaker god, but the Doctor won’t oblige him with an adoring word or a towering rage or a reassuringly familiar sanctimonious cliché, and he can know whatever the hell he wants to know, it means nothing because he feels like a tinker who’s wasted his life burrowing in the clockwork guts of the world, understanding little and accomplishing less.

 

He’ll have to try again to put the Doctor on an IV, with total parenteral nutrition, within the week. And isn’t that primitive and funny and disgusting and oh so nauseatingly human? He asks the Doctor. No response. Not even the old standard, “I have one thing to say to you,” repeated like a devout prayer, rote and repetitious but fervent with belief and hope. Alive.

 

 

He had swap out for the Doctor’s sixth body when the fifth started fainting. And he doesn’t want to look at the fifth Doctor again for a very long time after his stunt with the prison ship. The sixth body had a bit more stored energy, and even though for reasons he couldn’t remember he’d been less eager (strangely chagrined) to toy with the Doctor’s age after a bad drums day almost a year ago, he’d reduced the Doctor’s sixth body to its twenties in hopes it would hold against the strain of starvation until the Doctor gave up this idiotic impression of a coma-patient.

 

 

Gallifreyans could go for forty days without food or sleep before fainting like that. True death by starvation took them quite a long time, but still merely a flicker of their long lifespans. When the Master had tried to force a feeding tube or an IV-nutrient drip the Doctor had simply stopped a heart or two, letting the Master panic and fight to stabilize him, earning a temporary draw. Now the Doctor was too weak to exercise that kind of control over his body. Or so the Master hoped.

 

He wasn’t like the Doctor. Hope didn’t come naturally to him. It lurked in his body like a guest that wanted to leave, that bid its time out of politeness but only wanted to be back where it more properly belonged.

 

 

It’s disturbing to see the Doctor so still and silent. The Doctor in this regenerative stage should be angry and garish and vibrant, screaming at the world to obey his own private notions of justice. Perhaps as bombastic as the Master had ever known him but burning with the spark that made him incomparable.

 

The Master had briefly tried to appeal to the first form’s greater sense of compassion for him, but Theta wouldn’t play. Wouldn’t even leave the bed. Wouldn’t so much as focus his eyes on the Master, or respond to Koschei’s voice, armored in tenderness and promises to behave better.

 

When the Doctor refused to converse during the first year, when the Master didn’t have the energy for threats, he could peek inside the Doctor’s mind and watch a long list of rotating diagnoses and psychiatric theories, netting together and pushed to the front and center of the Doctor’s consciousness to show the Master the Doctor’s real willingness to help him. If the Doctor hadn’t formulated any that looked terribly promising yet, he would eventually. Monkeys type Shakespeare if left at it long enough, and the Doctor, despite the Master’s frequent taunts to the contrary, had significantly more brains and experience to work with.

 

Now the Doctor’s mind resonated as if it were hollow, and touching it was like falling into a well. The Doctor may have been buried somewhere very, very deep in the blackness, huddled to keep himself warm in the self-imposed night.

 

But if that’s true why hasn’t the Master found him? He’s plunged into the inky mind (like lowering himself into a cave, cautious and biting back his urge to run because this is grotesque and sick and  _hurts_ ) again and again with all the determination with which he once invaded the Doctor’s body, and mentally shouted for him, listening in horror as the organic blackness ate the very echoes.

 

Alternatively, the Doctor is thinking about nothing. Absolutely nothing. And has been for months. This seems more likely, as he was able to exercise enough awareness of his body to control his heart rate. And if it’s that, it will drive the Doctor mad. If it hasn’t already. The Master has no guarantee the Doctor will emerge from this unscathed. If he emerges.

 

He thought he might have begun to speak on a loop. The same jokes, the same incendiary, deliberately provoking remarks, the same one-sided conversations about what he’d done today, in the hours he’d hidden from the Doctor’s blank eyes in the lab working on something, anything, speaking to his Toclafane as if everything hadn’t gone to shit.

 

 

Following automatic instincts he pulls the Doctor’s head towards his with one hand, and it rolls, tensionless, limply to the side like the neck’s been snapped. He feels like vomiting. He feels like he’s felt like this before. He has. This is what hell is like. This is hell.

 

On a night when the drums were horrible (They’re regularly terrible now, and no one reads him poems and touches his face and he comes to with the taste of his own vomit in his mouth and Never. Never. Candy.) he fucked the Doctor like this, wanting the comfort of it, being careful not to initiate mental contact (though it was second nature and he had every right to and he ached to and he couldn’t quite believe there would be nothing there, with the same species of disassociation that came over him when he couldn’t quite believe that if he physically got to the (vanished) constellation of Kasterborous there would be nothing but a hole where the world had been).

 

He slid into the Doctor after too long of nothing but his hands and fresh memories that cut as they comforted and laughed hysterically with relief, relishing the warmth and contact. But as he built to a rhythm he thought of his preparation of the body below for this, of slicking oil into him, or rather, not  _him_ , but  _‘the body.”_  Like what he was doing was a form of necrophilia. He was unwanted, ravishing an insensate Doctor that didn’t register his existence, let alone need this like he did.

 

He was distracted by the nothingness he could taste creeping around the edges of his mind from the contact, licking at his shields. It reminded him of how the sick smiling Futurekind has used to walk the perimeter of the Malcassario base, running their hands along the non-electrified potions of the fence, slinking their fingers through the links. Just testing. He’d been human then. Those worthless little things had frightened him.

 

 

A telepathic mind as strong and developed as the Doctor’s, emptied of its expansive personality, still sought its form of nourishment. It cast out for stimulation and input, preferably from another mind like it. The more deprived the Doctor’s sick brain became the more it tried to consume his own. When he shared a bed with the Doctor at night he could hear it keening.

 

 

It, it, he could  _never_  think of it as the Doctor. It sounded lost, broken and alluring. It told the Master how strong he was and how much it needed him. Cruel, grotesque parody of what he wanted to hear. He couldn’t bear to listen, but he couldn’t sleep alone. He’d tried to snatch hours in unfamiliar bedrooms but he knew the Doctor was only walls away and it tormented him, enraged him, he shouldn’t be reduced to avoiding his bedroom, to hiding from his own—

 

 

He never slept properly anymore.

 

He ran his tongue across the broad spread of the Doctor’s shoulder blades, which rose prominent from the Doctor’s emaciated back like wings. The Doctor was on his stomach, because the Master didn’t want to have to see his face when he did this, wouldn’t look at his lips flopping open and shut with the jerks of the Master’s hips like he was dead, like the Doctor could be reduced to that, just a corpse. He planted his hands in the blonde curls he’d washed himself that morning—the frailer the Doctor got, the less the Master allowed the Domestibots to touch him.

 

 

He kissed the Doctor’s neck in small, chaste pecks. Over and over. As if the body beneath him could feel it, could get one ounce of pleasure out of this. He flicked his tongue over an achingly slow pulse and was suddenly as furious as he could ever remember being, biting and clawing and screaming as he drove into the Doctor, doing as much damage as his tired body could inflict, ripping open skin that no one but him ever saw with his fingernails.

 

“You stubborn fuck, you fucking bastard, I  _hate_ you,” he panted as he twisted the Doctor’s arm back to the breaking point as if the body were struggling and needed subdued, “ How  _dare_  you pull this shit again, why do you always, stupid stubborn pathetic faithless hypocritical sanctimonious  _fuck_ , I fucking  _hate_  you, you, you,  _you, Doctor_!” He hissed the name through his chattering teeth, feeling the bone splinter under his right hand and a hip crack under his left, coming with a whimper.

 

He slid out immediately; already limp as if even his body was giving up. Normally he liked to relish a bit—but this wasn’t ‘normally,’ was it. Was normally the last years? The last centuries? Some halcyon time centuries ago? God he made himself sick.

 

 

He blinked rapidly and began to realize what he’d done. He rushed for the bedroom’s hi-tech first aid kit. The Doctor’s bones knit back together and every knick was carefully erased with the tissue regenerator function he’d had to install into his laser screwdriver. Even the evidence that he’d been with the Doctor at all was removed with a towel bath The Master wiped his own wet cheeks so hard and punishingly long the top layer of skin came off. With raw pink flesh, he looked as if he were blushing.

 

        He kissed the back of the Doctor’s neck, because a thousand years ago it had been something of a tradition afterwards with them, and because he’d stood behind this body in a forest on Earth once, close enough to touch. It brought him back, all three of them, their old circle together again, hadn’t that been surreal, and he’d thought  _I just wonder what he’d do if I tried it_.

 

He gathered the clean body to him and slept against it like they had when they were children scared by some older student’s graphic stories of the Toclafane. Theta was almost always a little taller than he was. The Doctor was consistent in that physical aspect of his regenerations if not much else. The Master didn’t mind, didn’t begrudge him that.

 

 

He was never going to do this again.

 

“Come home.” he tried, unable even to laugh at the impossibility of his own request. How long will you love me, he didn’t ask of the still Doctor. He refused to hear nothing.


	8. I Saw Shaddows

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the Doctor lurks, the Master goes spelunking in his mindscape, and, in a stunning refusal to Ever Learn, both are rather over-confident about their respective battle plans.

I Saw Shadows

There is a room. A little cell of a library. Walls, or not so much walls as shelves piled haphazardly with books, form narrow corridors that cul-de-sac in this shabby space. The passages stretch off into the darkness like the veins of some great, unfathomable animal. One bulb, light unwavering, dangles on a wire, which has tangled with its pull cord. Dust covers all the surfaces, ash gray and strange. A rotten-apple smell clots the air.

It’s not a real room. The light bulb is more than a light bulb-- it is his hope and his will and it burns relentlessly, when he wishes it would go out, when he needs it, even when he takes it for granted-- and less in that it has no physical substance. There is a worn desk with a battered old chair, and huddled in it is the Doctor in his seventh body, seated, pouring over an old book that isn’t his.

At the end of one corridor there’s a door, and the Doctor is careful not to touch it, not even to approach it too closely. He’d graze the surface of his consciousness. His shadow might cross the frame, and he would he detected. This would, of course, alert his vigilant pursuer. He is being hunted, after all.

A dreaming person thinks they interact with an environment-- things happen to the subject that are uncontrollable and experienced like the events of the real world. They think that the representation of them is their subjectivity within the dream. But every setting and event, as well as the seeming subject, is composed of the dreamer.

A man dreams he arrives at school naked. He is the classroom of spectators. He shames himself. Another dreamer is screaming down a crooked path, and she is the wolf pursuing her. She is the desolate ground she traverses. The strange houses, the odd light: all made of them. If one dreams of falling, they are the fall, and the terror of it.

So the Doctor is the silent, dormant library and the man and the door. In much the same manner he is nine other men; threaded through with common memories, and the evolving-constant, the eternal center of his soul. He is not frightened because he is the stale air and the crippling silence, and the rest of them chose him to stay. He has packed rest of him up in the attic while he keeps them-him running, custodian of a vast mansion whose owners are abroad.

They chose him because he outlasted Fenric. Because he is strong in his way and knows quite a lot about this kind of war. He cannot beat the Master with cleverness, because they are both convinced they can do anything, and contesting the point is what’s led them here in the first place. The Seventh Doctor is going to win by waiting.

It’s a clever little set up, and though he’s going out of his mind from boredom, his madness is hyperbolic rather than literal. There are stacks of books around him and he’s read them all, occasionally daring to steal out to the library for more. A few coy, unobtrusive beakers form a lab at which he potters, doing thought experiments. If none of this seems terribly generative, well, he has much to think about, and introspection is something he’s neglected too long anyway.

He’s found what he came for, actually. What he’s been hunting for these last years, and to be honest, the last centuries before that. And here in the ruminating dark of him, he’s come to accept that his solution, which is a terrible violation of the man he best loves, is the only viable alternative.

There are two light switches on the wall. They have nothing to do with the bulb. A thought strung out to the surface as a trigger line twitches, showing another attempt to keep him alive. He’s had to flick one or both of them a few times to prevent being fed. He’s too deeply buried here to reel with pain when his hearts, which they represent, slam to a halt.

His jailor must be taught, through desperation and long, empty nights, through the torture of being able to come so close and never touch. The Master has to be brought low, down to where there is no effectual response, because that’s where hope is. And the Master is long overdue for developing an understanding of the care and keeping of that particular frail monster.

He’s let the wires twitch unheeded for a few weeks now, because in order for this to work his captor must believe the Doctor can survive. Many would suggest that this is not something you can force, but the Doctor hasn’t the luxury of caring.

***

The Master, like many people fixated on the idea of control, has rituals. With each body he develops new habits. He keeps to them when he pleases, and he breaks them when they no longer suit his purpose or inclination.

One of his bodies had liked cigars. His body during the Time War had shaved like it was a religious rite, a sonic blade and a careful pattern of strokes, never a nick and close as could be.

This time he favors bourbon, rolling around the highball glass in a viscous arc, sloshing into his mouth, stinging at his palate. He likes how it’s sharp.

It’s got piquancy—a useful little human word for an agreeably pungent or sharp flavor, a pleasantly stimulating, interesting, or attractive anything. But it used to mean stinging, especially to the feelings.

He likes having the Doctor kiss the sharpness better. He likes breathing the fumes, the ghost of indulgence, into that shifting, subtle mouth. He likes the Doctor’s gently probing tongue stroking his and knowing his ever-busy partner is absently cataloging the chemicals, the vintage, the amount consumed, forming his strange, pleasant little opinions about all of it.

The Doctor hasn’t been in any position to play connoisseur lately. The Master’s had to alter his habits, adopt a new custom. But his new ritual is not so sensually indulgent.

He’s been compulsively checking for signs of life in his companion, every day giving the Doctor a last chance before sliding the feeding tube down his now pliant, complacent throat. The pale neck always clenches around the tube, skin stretching around the clinical length.

The Doctor’s eyes are dull and unshining as forgotten things, and the Master’s mouth is a thin chalk line. Your eyes should bright and that should be me, he thinks, nothing in you but me, in your body and mind, nothing touching you but me, and your eyes should be bright. I know you, everything about you. I know what you want. What I don’t know is why you won’t take it, or even let me give it to you.

The Master shakes his head because he should know better by now. No one is more incapable of being happy than the Doctor.

But he’s not doing that well at the moment, himself, cocooned in a silence so absolute: just the hum of his well-maintained engines and his own drums, and what’s the point of music now? The Master misses the flavor of bourbon and the sound of the Doctor’s raised voice giving an argument all he’s got and his fucking life. The one he’s entitled to.

He’s not accustomed to self-recrimination, but nature abhors a vacuum: In the quiet he can hear his own words rolling back along the walls. It’s what gives your destruction its piquancy.

Stimulation wrapped thin around a sick, fat kernel of pain-- the more original sense of the word, and the truer one. He winces at the memory, at his own tendency to say just a little too much, and in a manner more revealing than he might have liked, to the Doctor. Like some awkward besotted schoolboy. Any moment he’d be all spotty and stuttering.

Maybe the central problem isn’t a persistent string of plans gone wrong and successes slipping through his fingers. It might instead be a fundamental indecision inherent to his character. He wonders whether his desires fork his will into running at cross-purposes, and if maybe the Doctor isn’t, after all, as great a threat to his success as him himself.

And this line of thought is a crack in his foundations. He is ignoring it as best he can, because it is ridiculous. It must be. Oh, but he never could stop picking at a problem.

“Let me in.” He runs a palm across the Doctor’s temple, immediately snagged by the hungry tendrils of thought. They swarm like kudzu vines, covering the surface of his mind in a thick, writhing blanket, unbelievably fast, worming their way up to his shields, which he obligingly eases open because this is the only way in. Each time he descends now it’s harder to get back out, and he could hack away at the invasive black thing, but it is the stuff of the Doctor’s mind, and he won’t. He can’t hobble the Doctor like that. He would kill him first.

"Shhh. There’s my good Doctor,” the Master whispers, and the vines settle, coil in the comfort in his tone and don’t press further into his own mind. Then he’s slipped in and lost contact with their physical bodies. Clinging to a rope, the end of which he’s tethered to his physical self, the Master jumps down through an ill-defined aperture.

In a healthy mind the limits and access points would be elaborately marked, and guarded. But this feels not so much like crossing a border as seeping through a membrane. If the Master had to approximately describe what sliding through did to his brain he’d say it made him wretch.

From his pocket he takes a ball on a long string. It’s small and pearly, cold and hard as a billiard ball. It’s actually a thought, a little bit of him. This happens to be the thought of the one terribly jarring note that ruins an otherwise excellent song from a very distant planet, one that would be a favorite of his but for that single fucking note. Holding the gossamer end of the string he tosses down the ball idly, like a boy playing.

Normally this fathoming produces nothing, no floor to this place, and the Master pulls the ball back and climbs up, half eager to be out of the clammy searching darkness, half furious at the lack of results, and entirely desperate, fully afraid of what another day of this must mean. Today the string tightens and snaps before he can react. The Master blinks, an uncertain grin crawling across his mouth because finally, something.

He takes another thought from his pocket. This is part of me, he takes a moment to recognize as he twirls it in his right hand, palming the weight. It is a niggling reminder to put on a jumper next time he finds himself on Woman Wept, because last time he trusted in his Gallifreyan hardiness and his thin Nehru jacket and was miserably cold. Because it is a reminder-thought it flashes and hums when touched, designed to pop up like an Internet ad when he’s thinking on the subject it pertains to.

It is just a little, irreplaceable fragment. And if he is careless, if he tests this place, he could loose it, and never get it back. If he gave up some small part of himself, he would change, he would be different, forever. But he can’t live like this-- he can’t not know and he can’t not try.

Looping the strand thicker, surer, into a cord, the Master lowers his plumb again.

Plink.

It hits a surface. Distance doesn’t mean much here, and if there’s something to land on that means activity. It’ll do. The Master hauls up his reminder, leaps from his rope, lands in a crouch and straightens up adjusting his tie, a little proud of the neatness of his landing—it indicates a certain psychic grace that he’s put some effort into developing over the years.

He whistles something jaunty, testing the boundaries of the space with the echoes. The Master knows the dimensions correspond to nothing real, but there’s been persistent emptiness in the Doctor’s mindscape for so long that the Master revels in the length and breadth of the room.

“Come out, come out, wherever you are!” he calls sardonically, twirling with a wide gesture, hands held out to show he’s ready for anything waiting in the dark. He knows the Doctor might have left a construct to defend himself with, and while the Master is undeniably the better psychic of the two of them, such a thing would be formidable, powered by all the energy the Doctor has siphoned away from his consciousness.

“Come on Doctor,” he sneers. “You invite me down, give me a bit of ground to stand on. You must have a reason. Something you want to show me, hmm?” The Doctor wouldn’t lure him into a dark corner and kill him while the Master is vulnerable, separated from his body, his mind enmeshed in the Doctor’s. It’s not his style. And the Master, sneering at it and hating it, has always depended on the Doctor’s elemental goodness.

There, generating its own faint light, is his Small Annoyance. The Master walks over to retrieve it, but as he touches the ball it rolls down a distinct incline that is suddenly present. The Master bends and scrolls his hand across the dark surface, testing the slope and finding it navigable.

Standing, he catches up to his Small Annoyance and uses it as a little lantern to guide him down the path. Soon he notices thin, shiny-black lines scrawling across the surface, forming a pattern, distinct against the matte-black that encompasses him. Forming a web, actually.

“Come into my parlor,” the Master whispers, and then laughs barkingly. “Oh really now. You’re hardly the spider, and I’m certainly not a fly.” The Doctor is making one of his eye-roll provoking jokes. That says better things about the state of his mind than the Master had schooled himself to hope. He begins to run down the path, pelting further into the darkness, impatient to see where the road leads.

 

The light of the place moves from a gloaming to full visibility imperceptibly. The Master puts away his Small Annoyance, quirking his lip because in the metaphor world of the mindscape an Annoyance has led him back to his favorite unscratchable itch, and it’s all rather quaint.

The Master is standing in trenches now. They look recognizably human in construction and old, less sophisticated than those of the Earth’s first world war. Different terrain too. This hot, humid stretch of ground isn’t the Somme. The push for Richmond at the Battle of Fredericksburg, maybe, as there’s no barbed wire in evidence. The Doctor’s mental constructs frequently borrowed from bits of Earth’s history. He seems to see himself in continuity with his mother’s species. The Master toes a Potomac regimental hat across the ground. It’s coated in dust and what looks like blood.

“Attrition,” the Master realizes suddenly. The mindscape reflects what the Doctor is doing. It can’t help but be a self-reflective commentary on what he’s thinking about. It’s this field and it’s this battle because all the Doctor’s energy is bent towards a very specific kind of victory.

“You’ve been wearing me down, softening me up.” The Master pops the p like a lolly he’s rolling about in his mouth. “Letting me suffer on purpose. And you’re not even ashamed to show it. You should be, you manipulative little fuck.” His smile flutters coyly, and his tone round as Snow White’s apple, and just as stuck through with poison. He cranes his neck around to spot anything like the snipers that should accompany this scene.

“They lost, you know.” The Master addresses the wheeling carrion birds. “And this is a crap analogy. You’re not exactly gunning for slavery as an economic system. Or at least you weren’t when last we spoke. Though,” he rubs his hand on his chin, considering, “I’ll admit it’s been a while. You could have radically different opinions by now. I do hope you’ve haven’t found God or anything.”

One of the birds takes a dive at the Master, forcing him in the direction of a shelled building.

“Dammit, I’m going!” the Master snaps, and the bird ascends for more of its customary Creepy Lingering, despite the notable absence of juicy corpses for the flock to pick at in the Doctor’s typically sanguine imagination. “Didn’t have to be so rude,” the Master grouses. “Just an observation.”

Then he gives the building he’s in front of another glance and spots a slate blue door, just exactly the comforting shade police boxes are painted in, tucked into the wall of the wreck of what looks to be a mill. The door’s so unobtrusive as to be obtrusive, and the Master smiles like a crocodile.

“Bingo.”  
***

Koschei heavily annotated all his books. His strange handwriting, the curves and flourishes of a born sensualist married to the bold vertical drops of a born control freak, marched across the paper in an invasion force of personality.

Bits were underlined or questioned, extra tidbits from the lecture or personal knowledge pertaining to the subject or whatever he happened to be thinking about at the time found their way into the margins until his texts all looked like Grimoires, like the work of a careful Talmudic scholar. Like they belonged exclusively to him, as if no one else had ever purchased or been assigned ‘Introduction to Modern Temporal Theory: A Primer’.

Borrowing that work one day, Theta had been surprised to discover the margin of the page he needed peopled with sketches of himself dozing in his adjacent seat. Throughout the book a few quick strokes illustrated teachers or other classmates in interesting poses, but on page after page, there were careful studies of Theta in all his attitudes, draped over chapter headings and between diagrams. The pattern was repeated in all his books (all of which were for classes they shared, because they’d existed in tandem back then).

Koschei, coming into the room, snapped the book out his hands and sneered a quick comment about how abysmally boring their lectures were like an excuse. But Theta wouldn’t let the warmth in his cheeks be wrestled from him by a brusque dismissal. Koschei might be a bit imperious, possessive, impatient and even sometimes cruel, but Theta knew he was loved, loved in pencil lines and attention to detail, loved by someone who captured the way he craned his neck to look out the window and the manner in which he toyed with his stylus.

And it was perfect, because he adored Koschei to the point of pain. He laughed with him so hard his sides hurt, grinned until his mouth and teeth ached. He talked with him until he ran out of breath, and they fucked frantically until they dropped off to sleep so fast and hard it was like rolling off a cliff. In the morning they woke up and did it all again. People had said they were too much in love for it to last, and Theta had laughed at them. Even now he knew they’d been so fundamentally wrong—a lack of devotion had never been their problem.

Whole little books of him. It was flattering, then. In his mind the Doctor reads one of them now, like a man freezing to death would coil around a fire. He holds to the promise of Koschei whole and happy.

Some people took them seriously enough, even back then, to say they loved more than was healthy. Acknowledging this as a palpable hit wasn’t the same as stopping. The Doctor hasn’t ever been able to uproot that history, to evolve or regenerate away from the basic tendency of his personality to be fond of the Master in all his moods and incarnations, to cherish him despite the costs, to need to save him.

He thinks of the Master’s will, still strong under the virus, strong even when his eyes flashed with green-shine like a cat’s, when anyone else would have been lost to incoherent, dribbling savagery, and the Doctor believes that it might be possible still to save him. The Master’s personality has remained integral. It’s been stretched and gouged through by madness, and it’s lace-delicate but oh so persistently extant. The Doctor has seen many wonders traveling throughout the universe, but still, the Master is unique.

The Doctor used to wish to hate him, and it never quite came. He got close, always approaching but never reaching. Like an exponential equation, every one of the Master’s sins advanced towards the limit of the Doctor’s fundamental love of him, but they were never able even to touch it, let alone cross it.

So when he couldn’t hate the Master, he wished he’d never met someone so singular, someone who made everyone else seem stale and trite, someone who soured the taste of other mouths and numbed him to the touch of strange hands. He tried to forget he had ever known anyone like that. And he realized this was a betrayal of a greater order.

Being partly human, the Doctor understood adaptation better than his fully Time Lord counterparts ever could. Certainly the Master had never lost that old fear of change, of death, and had never forgiven the Doctor for his appalling lack of it.

The Doctor made new friends and cultivated fresh loves in due course. He tended to stick to female lovers, and his was a short, discrete list, almost prim for someone of his age and experience. And when those friendships and romances ended he sailed on blithely, rarely popping by to visit, never rekindling old flames. He didn’t need to, because he hadn’t let himself get too involved. The Doctor became a veritable wizard at moving ever onwards.

And it worked. For a given value of ‘worked.’ For a time.

But at every encounter, when the Master, wild, wise and wicked as the serpent in the garden swum into his ken, things cracked around the edges of the Doctor’s world. The Master was fully-grown now, more deliberate and seductive than he’d been when they were children, managing to mature without loosing any of his spark.

You, the Doctor would think, suddenly breathless and wide-eyed and alive. Oh you.

And that is why the Seventh Doctor is in hiding, because this is what he’s fighting for. You can work through issues, but you can’t work through insanity. It’s not a maze to be navigated, but an impassable jungle, and burning through it would only rip away at the Master until there was nothing left to save. The Doctor understands that now. He’s come up with something with a better chance of working.

He’s been plotting, he’s been scheming, because he literally learned it from the Master, and maybe it’s time to turn those tactics back against the man who taught him all the best things he knows about calculation and deceit. This time he’s going to act before the Master forces him to react. He’s playing white instead of black, opening aggressively, and he will not, he cannot, draw this game.

When it comes the knock startles him, though obviously he knows what, or rather who, it is. He looks up from his book, confused at how suddenly the time he’s planned for is upon him, because how could he not be after so long a silence he has even stopped talking to himself?  
The knock becomes a pound that rattles the hinges. The door is being battered at by someone who knows how to calculate the stress of his blows with mathematical procession—or more correctly, by someone who can’t help compulsively doing so. The wood creeks, plaintive. The Master is very determined.  
The Doctor rolls his eyes. The door’s unlocked, but the Master has yet to even try the handle. Typical.  
***  
Children are crueler than adults—they put more into it. Cruelty is exhausting, and children have so much energy. They are capable of going to lengths no adult could reach. The Master, with his little boy face and his Cupid’s bow mouth, with his caprice, his unbound imagination, his selfish refusal to comprehend the larger consequences of his actions and his endless reserves of willfulness, is childlike. And it is with all a child’s glee he raps his knuckles on the door playfully.

“Gotcha,” he sing songs, scowling when no one answers and deciding, whether or not the door’s locked, that he’s angry enough at not being acknowledged, and at this whole fucking rigmarole, at being left, alone and unwanted, again, to simply feel like breaking the door down. In a minute he’s done so, revealing the corridors, which, no surprise, seem to be larger than the building containing them, and wholly unconnected to the battlefield outside. And there, at long last, at their end, sits the man he’s been looking for in his seventh form. The Doctor looks up at the Master with a soft fondness that seems almost foolish but isn’t, and which the Master, very secretly, thinks a trifle sweet.

“Doctor.”  
***

“Master,” he acknowledges. It’s been so long, and as much as the Master wanted to hear him say the name, the Doctor craved to speak it. With mingled regret and anticipation the seventh Doctor blinks out of being. This is still so far from complete. But with the word on his lips and his plan rolling unstoppably onwards he feels almost home now.

***

Startled, the Master rushed forward to the desk, only to find something sitting smack in the middle of the blotter. A sort of box, small and black. A scrap of paper next to it reads, in those familiar swirling circles, ‘Deva Loka, the Kinda, a Box of Jhana,’ like the label to a museum piece.

The Master doesn’t recognize any of this, and he can’t take the box with him outside the mindscape, obviously. So. The Doctor wants him to track this down, like some fucking princess demanding that her suitor bring her rapunzel or radishes or whatever from the garden of the unfriendly neighborhood enchantress. When the Doctor is compos mentis again the Master is going to kill him for this. And Rassilon is there some sex to catch up on. If the Doctor doesn’t think he’s been keeping a running balance (in which the Doctor is way into the red, so indebted he won’t sit comfortably for months at this rate), he’s being naïve again.

He turns the scrap over. Galactic coordinates. Now that he can work with. As if cued by his action the box melts, the stuff of it becoming the organic dark of the mindscape and oozing viscous through his fingers. Without the Doctor’s avatar here to act as the guardian and the lynchpin this place has begun to collapse. The Master quickly memorizes everything on the note and, in an instant, that too is no longer paper, just a cold black thing running down his wrist, creeping under the cuff of his shirt.

The room drips down around the Master like paint in a Dali scene, seeping into the floor and becoming nothing, and suddenly there is no floor and the Master staggers to quickly adjust, to accustom himself to floating rather than being supported by substance and gravity. He knows the way back, but barely now, without any markers.

He misses the dark, foul old London of the Sixth Doctor’s mind—the substance of it, the richness and complexity of his troubled mindscape. How he had to struggle through tacky air (he imagined he could smell it on his velvet jacket for days after), and breathe in strange fumes.

In the void he can admit he simply misses the Doctor. He aches for him.

After so long, so weak, in the dark, living like a mole, the Doctor cannot survive long with no avatar at all to sustain him. The Master will have to do this fast then, bring him the box and wait and see what happens next.

The Doctor didn’t have to make this an ultimatum, the Master thinks, a little plaintive, climbing up the rope ladder he summoned into being, I would have done it if he’d asked. Well, if he’d begged. And it’s not like begging me is anything new for him. He LIKES it.

Was this how the Doctor had felt, dragged onto a collapsing, infected planet, forced to come to the Master’s aid? The Master had known that had he simply requested the Doctor’s help weak, soft Theta would come running as surely as in youth he’d sprung animals from traps, simply because he detested suffering. But he didn’t want the Doctor to come for pity’s sake, or for the sake of memory. And the Master couldn’t stomach the possibility of being told no by the Doctor; he had to take his pleasures to preempt being denied them.

I’m difficult, the Master realizes, swimming up into his own head and blinking open his eyes, tired from the mental exercise. It’s difficult for him to love me. Feeling as if he’d suddenly, after a lifetime of living under it, realized the sky was blue, he laughs until he coughs, until the breath snags in his chest like it’s catching at his ribs and he sleeps, a sweet and dreamless sleep right there on the conference room floor.

A deadline, disaster on the horizon, an object he needs, a prop if you will—all bits of a blessed, comprehensible plan. He can do this. Fetch the box, retrieve the Doctor, reconstruct his life, their life and figure out some way to make sure the Doctor never, ever did this again, which he can do now that he’s better prepared, better understands the situation: that suits him perfectly.

When he wakes he rolls over and thinks that he has slept too long and the Doctor will be hungry, hasn’t had anything at all today.

“Poor neglected thing,” he tuts sympathetically. The food from earlier is useless now from having sat out all day. The particles in the mixture have precipitated, forming repulsive strata of gunk. Mixing chemicals with the flair of a chef, he loads the IV with a freshly mixed bag of nutrient fluid. “I’d hate for any harm to come to you, especially now, when I’ve finally found the cure for your little psychosomatic episode.”

Snapping to action with new energy, he dips the tube down the Doctor’s throat with a flourish. There’s no resistance.

“Awfully obliging today.” He pats the Doctor’s cheek jovially. Taking food without resistance like this, the Doctor might even be healthy for his return to consciousness, the Master thinks brightly.

He calls in a specific Toclafane. This particular orb used to be a little boy Professor Yana had been very kind to. It still had a bit higher than average intelligence and loyalty to the Master, in the limited way that part of a collective consciousness can be individuated and possess distinct attributes. The thing that had been Creet had once had blonde hair and run about in his lab, fetching him materials when he wanted them. Creet was always pestering him for stories about Utopia in his own brisk, efficient little way.

The patches of flesh inside the sphere remembers sipping bad cocoa (even then Yana had known it hadn’t tasted right, though he couldn’t pin down why he’d known what cocoa should taste like) that Chantho had boiled on the portable stove for them when the heat generators kicked out. The Master doesn’t resent it for the memory. He thinks his lack of hatred strange, but isn’t accustomed to questioning his own whims.

He tells the metal thing that was once Creet not to kill anyone if it didn’t have to in order to get the box. You never knew when something or someone might come in useful. The Master has no idea what the box is, or how to operate it, or even if it requires operation, after all. And with a feeling not unlike pride he sends it on its way.

Alone again (but not for long), he drags the feeding tube from the Doctor’s pliant throat, wipes the saliva brought to the Doctor’s lips by feeding him, from the other Time Lord’s mouth neatly with a handkerchief, and climbs up and straddles him, holding the Doctor’s face between his hands.

“My food any good?” he asks, and on impulse pulls the Doctor to him, and lets him fall back into the seat, hands fluttering all over the familiar frame, almost silly with glee. “You’ll be home soon.” His voice drips with intent like poisoned honey. “And I’ll never let you do anything like this ever again.”

The Master kisses his forehead, grown gentle now that the Doctor isn’t there to appreciate it, free from the Doctor’s smug understanding. “I’ll protect you from yourself,” he says, and tightens a hand on the Doctor’s throat to show it’s a promise. “Just you watch.”


	9. Pictures of the Floating World

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the Toclafane gets back with the Kinda box, Jacobi!Master watches unusual reality programming, and the Eighth Doctor has no luck with his health. Again.

Pictures of the Floating World

Part I

 

 

             A trigger phrase, the Master thought, passing the newly arrived box between his hands and pacing the room as he thought over the problem of how to awaken the Doctor—but no, it wouldn’t be that. His Toclafane courier, once it had reported to him and been freed of the atmosphere-containment harness that the Master had provided it with to safely retrieve the object, had bobbed off on some other work. It neither expected nor received its Master’s thanks for traveling across the galaxy and rushing back, completing the incredible journey in the space of mere weeks.

From all appearances the object the Doctor had wanted so desperately was just a plain little box, wooden and uninteresting. A tiny spot of blood, the Master noticed suddenly, decorated the surface. Several actually.

Frowning he licked his thumb and scrubbed them off. He’d have to wash it properly. The Doctor did get so skittish if he caught sight of a bit of unaccounted-for hemoglobin, and the Master had plans for their reunion that didn’t involve listening to the other Time Lord’s fretful whinging. His Toclafane must have omitted some of the difficulties of attaining the box in his report, if someone had shed blood to keep it on the planet.

Whatever this was, it was precious. Perhaps some ritual object? The Toclafane he’d debriefed had said the technology level of the people he’d retrieved it from was low. The Doctor’s TARDIS had been unwilling to give the Master any information on the planet. It had no galactic records that he could find in this time frame. His Toclafane had reported the inhabitants’ mute refusal to divulge anything about the thing in their keeping. Had they even made it themselves?

There was no way in hell he was opening it without a very good idea of what he was getting into. He could run it through a series of tests, detect its fields and energies, but the Master had no idea if the Doctor could hold out until his wariness was soothed.

The Doctor wouldn’t stake his life on the Master blindly opening a box that might well be designed to kill everyone near, would he? Much as he’d like to dismiss the notion, it wouldn’t be entirely out of character for the Doctor, who threw his regenerations away on his pets at the slightest provocation, to decide it was better that the last Time Lords die together. The Doctor might rather complete his genocide than doom the universe to an unfettered Master. But he couldn’t think the Master would be willing to risk that.

The Master wasn’t Pandora, and he wasn’t an idiot. Ergo there must be some other, related stimulus that would bring him around. But if not a triggering phrase, which could be anything and seemed too vague to be correct, then what?

There was nothing more frustrating than having the proper tool and not knowing how to use it. As a cancer in the Master's mind, it was equaled only by the rage he felt at possessing an incredibly powerful tool that was completely useless at what he actually needed it to do. The screwdriver pushed the Doctor into other regenerative forms by cribbing his Matrix biodata and re-invoking it from the Doctor’s existing biological structure. That meant the switch could circumnavigate any injuries the Doctor sustained, as his Matrix pattern could not altered or corrupted. The problem was the Doctor’s body was starved for energy, and the process couldn’t access reserves that didn’t exist. He couldn’t be restored to rosy health with a costume change.

The Master had gotten the Doctor’s vacant body to accept nourishment in the past weeks, but he still looked underfed and wan. His fast had lasted too long for his body to recover easily, and the coma had slowed his body’s natural healing processes almost to a standstill.

Striding into the room where he’d left the Doctor, the Master indulged his compulsion and checked the prone man’s mental activity. From the Doctor’s mind came the very slightest of stirrings. Just from being in the same room as the box? The Master brought it closer and the activity increased. When he held the box almost to the Doctor’s skin the other Time Lord’s thoughts moved like cicada nymphs, burrowing frantically towards the air after their hibernation. He snatched the box away. He’d waited too long for this meeting to be anything less than remarkable.

Touching it. The Doctor had to  _touch_  it. He’d always liked the eighth Doctor’s hands—the suggestion of musicality in the long, tapering fingers, the pale strength of them. He imagined them stroking the wood, palming the box, curling around his own flesh. The contrast of colors and textures was exquisite as that of the elements of a sacrament—the hands of a priest on velvet cloth and rough-hewn altar.

That one, then, he decided with a sharp nod. The Doctor was well fed enough now to sustain a form change without any great risk. And he could give him some better clothes, something chosen more for style than practicality for a medical patient.

The Master looked down at his own somewhat disheveled ensemble. Apparently he’d been gnawing at his well-manicured fingernails. From the brief impression he’d gotten of the Doctor’s mind it was in no immediate danger. There was, thankfully, time for the Master to make it look like he hadn’t gone to shambles in the Doctor’s absence.

“I’ve let myself go to hell,” he complained to the Doctor. “Or more accurately, you put me there. Look at my tie! Well, you can’t really, so I’ll summarize-- it’s askew! Have you ever known me to tie a sloppy knot? I ask because you’re the one most typically enjoying them or trying to squirm out of them. No?” He snapped his fingers before the Doctor’s vacant eyes. “Never?” He made a satisfied little noise. “ ’Swhat I thought.”

Focusing his screwdriver, he flicked the settings and carefully eased the Doctor’s body into its eighth life. It arched in a spasm under the beam, the reflexive action of cells objecting to being forced to act against their nature: to die, reconfigure and regenerate rapidly at his whim. If only the Doctor were as simple to control as his component parts.

When the body before him was trim to the point of looking almost spectral, with soft, long waves of reddish brown hair framing a face that looked troubled even in sleep, the Master smiled and repositioned the Doctor’s limbs, flung every which way by the body’s wild jerks. He tucked the Doctor into a neat sitting position and gave the contact point on his forehead a light kiss, relishing the squirming of mental energy he could feel when he leaned in, one hand holding the Kinda’s box.

Soon he’d have the Doctor back, eager and alive and his again.

“There now.” He put his cheek to the Doctor’s and turned his lips to graze along the skin. “Rest up and I’ll take you somewhere nice.”

 

 

 

***

 

 

 

When the Master was resurrected for the Time War he crept back in though the back door he’d left for himself in the Matrix proper and helped himself to data. Among a number of other things he wanted information on all that the Doctor had been up to while he was away.

He remembered how appalled the Doctor had been in his sixth body during his trial upon discovering the Time Lords had been using invasive surveillance and keeping a complete holographic record of all his doings for observation. What had the Doctor thought, that the Time Lords were going to ignore him as thoroughly as he did them? The interfering busybodies had never had such a wealth of material about which to feel removed and superior as enthusiastically disapproving of the Doctor’s actions provided them. Why would they give up such fine grist for their mill?

You could even watch it in live feed despite the time stream disruptions. Credit where it was due, the mechanisms involved were incredibly clever. The Master smirked at how his ancient race had managed to produce such efficient voyeurs. The war had offered them an excuse to extend and perfect their mechanisms of observation still further. The Master never could resist taking advantage of the system.

The Doctor unedited made for rather repetitive viewing. Again and again, the Master watched his best enemy stagger from battles, painted with so much blood, blood that sang out all the things he’d had to do to survive. And the Master couldn’t help understanding that song, any more than he could avoid reading words when he was staring at them.

Without flair or brilliance or eccentricity, the Doctor was simply living through the battles. He made gains; he was even, somewhat to the Master’s surprise (even when the Master had asked the Doctor to join him in the conquest of the universe he hadn’t imagined the other man as actively doing anything  _martial_ ), quite good at the prosecution of war. But nothing of the Doctor’s soul was in it.

One day the Doctor cut off his chestnut curls—they kept getting matted. Soon after he accepted the uniform everyone was wearing these days: possibly he was tired of getting shot at by his own kind before he was recognized, now that the Daleks were using humanoid replicates for much of their infantry, keeping themselves to the rear to run the massive shipyards. Velvet was impractical for a battlefield, the Master admitted. He himself was dressing simply these days.

After his task force lost the Nestene homeworld to the Dalek horde the Doctor allowed himself a pistol, which was the bare minimum of common sense. Then one of the war material plants burned in the fires of its own triggered forges, and the Doctor slipped absorptive armor under his new uniform, which peaked out at the collars and stretched the material awkwardly. It made the Doctor move stiffly, in abrupt jerks, like a nightmare. Then the capitol flotilla of the Shad fell, and the Doctor carried a high yield rifle. Then Trion was eradicated to the last man, the Doctor having failed to answer an old friend’s urgent call for assistance in time. After that the Doctor strapped what looked to be a perfected Matryoshka Cannon, so deadly and precise that it could take out a battalion or a butterfly, to his ever-thinner right arm whenever he left the TARDIS. Which he did rarely anymore, and never unless the mission required it.

 _Concessions,_  the Master thought, bewildered, because the Doctor didn’t make such compromises.

The eighth was such a poor Doctor for the Time War. Maybe the sixth, who was quicker to anger, or the seventh, so prone to machinations, or even the third, with his ability to absorb tragedy and move on, his cunning—maybe any of these would have been better equipped for the horrors that awaited the Doctor. But this Doctor was mild as May, soft as butter, shaky and easily affected.

Not to say the Doctor was stupid, or call him a coward—this was still the  _Doctor,_  after all, and even when he’d been regeneration sick and half mad, he was still the most capable person the Master had ever had the dubious pleasure of knowing. It was only that with the old fondness (which curled in the bottom of him, brittle like the yellow leaves of an old book, and yet an old, slow accumulation of feeling, age-swollen like a seabed), the Master wished the War could have happened to any other Doctor. One more able to forgive himself for the necessity of offering up his personality to the war’s dark altar.

The Master stopped watching when he realized he’d rather not see the Doctor quite this way, as a mere soldier, all the thought and elegance stripped from him to show only a steel core of his will to survive. The brutal transformation somehow made the Doctor look so vulnerable that it hurt to stare at him. The Master’s reticence to watch had nothing to do with the fact that he was increasingly afraid he’d actually see the Doctor die if he kept skimming through his records. He told himself so with a sneer, and he curbed his impulse to check up so frequently that eventually he accepted his own rationale.

But he woke up in the middle of one of his rare periods of rest, panting as if he’d been running, and he let himself look for the Doctor, too sleep deprived to check his own impulse, too confused to feel ridiculous for acting on intuition. He watched the Doctor claw his way through what would be remembered as one of the worst battles of the war, watched him fire all the rounds in the gun he was carrying, with eyes so dead they might never have had any feeling in them. The Doctor turned to run when his ammunition had been exhausted, only to get hit in the knee cap with a bit of grapeshot and  _scream_. He dragged himself back to his TARDIS and crawled under his time rotor, shaking and clutching at it for comfort. And still the Master could not go to him, because he wouldn’t be wanted, and to come with no pretext but pity, but concern, wasn’t a luxury he’d had in centuries.

Hair sticky and face suddenly slack from the tension that had immobilized it during the battle, the Doctor began to cry. He still cried like he had when they were children and he’d had one of his nightmares. Even holding a gun he himself must have modified to be more lethal, having just massacred a battalion of his enemies single-handed, his reaction was still so innocent. It was a collapse into wretched grief that didn’t bother with any pretense at dignity—they were the kind of noisy tears that seemed to beg to be noticed and soothed. Koschei had been their audience, once. It was strange to imagine now that anyone had ever found him a comfort.

For a happy child, Theta had been prone to a perplexing amount of nightmares. Koschei had never known why, but the Master had his suspicions. Had the Doctor dreamed of this even then, had the Vortex shown his uncomprehending child’s mind these ash-colored, electricity-and-oil-smelling days?

The Doctor’s gentle mouth collapsing into sobs when the battle was over, when he was safely back in his TARDIS, was like a restoration of faith for the Master. Instead of being frightened by how low war had brought the Doctor he nurtured a swell of pity for him he’d long since thought himself incapable of.

 _After this is over,_  he thought,  _I could find him, all broken and confused, and remind him who he is. I could be kind as he ever remembered me, or I could do something terrible he’d be simply compelled to meddle with, but he’d be himself again. I owe him that at least._

He pushed on, promising himself that encounter when everything was dealt with. In the wake of the war there might be an end to grievances that seemed smaller now, in the face of this. Didn’t their cosmic struggle seem somewhat ridiculous in the face of such a mass extinguishing of life? Couldn’t even their enmity be erased by so much spilt blood? He had the forgiveness of all his past crimes from his own government, and he might yet get forgiveness where it actually mattered to him. He might even offer it in return.

But the Master hadn’t stopped to consider. If change wrote lines into the Doctor’s face, it would take its toll on the Master as well. Arcadia burned anything but terror out of him. And the drums, never very kind to his more fragile dreams, rolled on louder as the war rose to its final, bleak crescendo, until he couldn’t even hear himself hope.

 

 

***

 

 

The Master worked quickly as the Doctor’s mind swam back into its native environs. Long, detailed stewing ( _planning,_  he liked to call it) had decided him on a firmly predetermined course of action. The Master accomplished much in the brief period between the reemergence of a working mind to access and the reemergence of the Doctor’s natural defenses.

The Master cauterized the path behind the Doctor as the other Time Lord struggled back up to consciousness. He knit up the permeable connections between all the versions of the Doctor, turned the fluidity that had allowed him to coalesce and hide into something solid, without any such give. The Master built himself a psychic back door and wedged the Doctor’s shields permanently open around it. The crowning glory of all this was the tie he established between them, which allowed him to listen in on the Doctor’s thoughts. He grinned when he heard the first amorphous echoes of them. His creation was a withered little parody of a true bond between Time Lords. The Doctor would be forced to appreciate the irony of that.

“It’s here,” thought the Doctor. Then came surprise that he could think at all.

With a start like he was being defibrillated, the Doctor’s eyes flung open and he tried to stand, only to find a hand on his chest pressing him down into the chair. The touch was too firm, too possessive—no need to ask whose hand it was, then.

“Did you open it?” The Doctor snatched at the wrist in front of him, seeing his own hand in the process and realizing which one of his selves he was—a startling differentiation after the soupy allness of hiding swirled together, jammed in an infinitesimally small corner of his own mindscape. His mind still felt off; it was a little painful, even, but he was groggy and couldn’t pinpoint the cause of his discomfort.

“I think you’re looking for ‘Hello, Master! Thank you ever so much for fetching me a present and saving what’s left of my admittedly rattled mind.’ Though I will accept any groveling apologies or acknowledgement of your own idiocy. You thought you could play dead?  _Really,_  Doctor? Your over-arching strategy is ‘be a possum?’”

It felt so good to talk to him instead of at him. Words had meaning; they  _existed_  for the first time in months. Oh, and the Doctor was getting annoyed, just look at that sour lower lip wobbling like a Weeble! The Master could snark at him for days running and not get bored.

“Master,  _please,_ open the box.”

“ ‘Open the box, Master!’ ” The other Time Lord minced out, high and mocking. “Not so fast, Doctor. Tell me what I’m holding before I expose the both of us to whatever little surprise you’ve got lurking in here.”

The Master demonstratively dragged the box from the Doctor’s sternum, where he’d been holding it to the skin to wake the Doctor, to his chin, where he tapped it playfully. The Doctor’s chest was bare in the gap between the sides of his partly unbuttoned shirt and a velvet jacket quite like the old one he’d worn in this regeneration. He'd not  _felt_  in so long that his exhausted form didn't quite know how to process it. The gesture made the Doctor aware of his own body (the Master had always been good at that, in one way or another). He dropped his grip on the Master’s other hand with some embarrassment before noticing something.

“There’s a spot on the rim,” the Doctor accused, glaring at the box under his chin and then up at the Master’s face, which twitched just slightly. The Master had actually washed off the blood himself, but some of it must have sunk into the unpolished wood grain. The Doctor narrowed his eyes, “I didn’t think you’d kill anyone to get it. The Kinda are—or is it ‘were,’ now? —entirely peaceful. You never used to be so sloppy.”

“Be that as it may,” the Master bristled, “I’ve obtained it, and I’d like to know why.” He’d really hoped to avoid this. In some corner of his addled mind he’d thought that when the Doctor woke up it could be like the better parts of his months with his fifth body, and he would have time to recover his equilibrium before starting in on their long, contiguous argument.

“Give it here,” the Doctor pleaded.

“Why?” The Master asked, pleasantly. “There’s no further use for the box, now you’ve woken. Shall I toss it down a ventilation shaft? I’d like to know what I’m chucking, just for curiosity’s sake. I enjoy destroying something so much more when I fully understand it.” The Doctor leveled a weak glare at him, but said nothing revealing. The Master sighed melodramatically.

“I suppose it’s the incinerator with this then. You might have pointed out we don’t  _have_ ventilation shafts, you were there when I redesigned the recycling current system. We're out an incinerator as well. But then maybe I built one while you were out, just to chuck your toys in when you’re bad? You wouldn’t know if I had, Van Winkle.”

“Don’t.”

“Or what?” The Master said, egging him on. He got a sick shuddering thrill from hearing the Doctor challenge him after so long a silence. The Doctor was a Time Lord, and his superior musculature hadn’t atrophied to any degree. But he was dredged of his characteristic energy, disoriented, absolutely wrecked, and he was still fighting.  _God_  the Master had missed him. “Exactly what are you going to do, Doctor? Lax as you are. My completely reliant little plaything,” the Master taunted, “Tell me what you think you can do to me  _now._ ”

“I’ll just duck back in my mind and rot there, shall I? I think I only have a few days left of being mentally recoverable. I could listen to remembered music until all the lights go out. I’d flicker out to my own elegy. Sounds more pleasant all the time!”

“Like hell you will,” the Master laughed with a cruelty that he felt matched that of the Doctor’s suggestion. “Try it!”

The Doctor attempted to sink back in and down, only to be snapped back like a dog at the end of a chain. He took a deep breath and tried to slide fully behind his shields. Again, he could almost seal them before being jerked out to the front of his consciousness. He started to pant with effort and panic.

“What did you do to me?”

“Several things, have fun trying to figure them all out,” the Master grinned, running his knuckles over the Doctor’s temple, almost tenderly, “But you’ll never be capable of a stunt like that again. That’s the match to me, I believe.”

“You tied whichever incarnation of me was currently active to something external, whatever else you did, I can _feel_  it.” And the Doctor could, it stretched and stung with uncomfortable newness like fresh scar tissue.

The Master nodded. “And it rotates—whichever body you’re in is tethered. Isn’t that clever?”

“Tethered to  _you,_ ” the Doctor realized. “You’re the stronger psychic, and you know it. But you can’t do this! If you’ve cut off the connections to my mindscape like you say, I’ll go mad, people don’t stay sane without that recourse to themselves!”

“I can do  _anything_ , and it’s time you acknowledged that. You’ll live,” the Master said from between his clenched teeth, “I can’t be blamed for the conditions you force me to accommodate.”

“Let me go.” The Doctor began to panic in earnest, feeling that every which way his mind turned it was snagged by its link to the Master’s, and he couldn’t escape, and he couldn’t  _think,_

The Master paced around his chair in slow circles. “Our minds were much more closely tied than this, once. You didn’t mind then. It wasn’t any burden to you,” he smiled softly, alluding to their youthful near-bonding. Neither of them had spoken of the disastrous failure of their initial relationship in all the centuries since. It would have been like ripping open the skin where an amputated limb had been attached. In spite of their long, absolute silence, the Master pressed on with a perversity that made the pale Doctor blanch white as a bleached bone. “I would have known if it was.”

That had been an easy, mutual, flowing mesh, not anything like this one-sided sensation of being ensnared by a sequence of tiny hooks and barbs. This felt like waking up with bits of wires and primitive medical equipment lodged in his chest, threaded through his arteries, and he couldn’t breathe and he couldn’t think—

“You know what I learned then, Doctor?” the Master stopped pacing, and turned to face the man who seemed to be working himself down into the upholstery of the chair. He leaned in over him, and brought their faces terribly close, “I can’t ever, ever trust you. Not to behave, not a word you say. Better to make sure of you myself. Now you can’t run off navel gazing the next time you get a little squeamish. Stop fussing at it!”

He grabbed the hands the Doctor was attempting to hold to his temples, pinned them above his head. He spoke quietly, lips brushing the Doctor’s own firm-shut ones slightly with every word. “When I say you’ll live I mean it.”

“Refuse to open it,” the Doctor responded, pushing down his fear. He couldn’t deal with it, not right now, and there were larger things at stake. Their lips met when he spoke and it was almost a kiss, “And I’ll test whether even you can remove every sharp edge and ingestible toxin from an entire aircraft carrier.”

The Master stilled entirely. He stepped back and surveyed the Doctor from his full height. “What?”

“You heard me.”

            “You completely ungrateful—I’ll lock you in a padded cell.  I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m in control of a great chunk of the universe at the moment! Don't you  _like_ sentient beings or some such nonsense?”

 

“A padded cell generally has wiring in the door mechanism you can remove to slit your throat as effectively as a KGB agent with piano wire could. Grow your nails out and you can rip through the fabric of your padded walls and choke yourself on the stuffing before another person could get across the length of a ship as big as this. Deliberately unravel your mind, like shredding an old scarf for the yarn, and not even the best psychic could reconstruct your personality. You know I’m inventive. And if you’d like to drug me until I can’t move or think or recognize your hands from the floor, well, you’re welcome to try, but I’d imagine from your efforts to search me out and bring me back you’re rather bored of blow-up dolls.“

“Are you listening properly? I’ll kill—”

“Oh of course you’ll kill,” the Doctor rolled his eyes, “it’s all you remember how to do anymore. And I imagine I’ll cry. But it won’t stop me. I have to try. It’s who I am. If pain could stop me, I’d never have left you, Koschei. If I could do that, then I can do anything. And it’s time you acknowledged that.”

“You assume,” the Master swallowed, “that I’m not thoroughly tired of your ridiculous histrionics. Don’t delude yourself into thinking you have leverage that you don’t. It’ll be awfully messy when your swelling head pops.”

The Doctor smiled. “I’ve always thought you eloquent. I don’t know if I’ve ever said that to you, in all these centuries. You put things so exactly right; I can only paraphrase. A universe without you is non-load-bearing. I drift along, but I don’t really  _live._  I know you. You feel the same.”

“I’m not such a fool as to let everything hinge on your glorious presence!” The Master shouted, red-faced, taking a threatening step closed to his seated opponent.

“Never a fool, but sometimes you don’t think things through. I can acquire new company—I’ve done it even in the wake of the war, but you? ‘Better to let them live in hope,’ wasn’t it? You won’t want to live without meaning.”

“I can live until the stars burn out and after,” the Master hissed, “If I choose to entertain myself with your presence it doesn’t mean I need you. While you gadded about the universe on all your ludicrous errands of mercy, I managed  _fine_ for centuries. You’re the one who can’t get on alone.”

“Will you want to outlast the stars?” The Doctor asked quietly. “What for, Master?”

The Master’s eyes narrowed.

“All this pointless waxing philosophic,” he tsked, calming himself with a tremendous effort of will. “I’d thought your sixth body was the one prone to melodrama. You’re blathering. You’re not well enough for whatever it is you intend to do after I open this. You’ll have to wait, and maybe when you’re healed you can go back to posturing.”

He passed a hand through the Doctor’s hair. “They tugged too hard when they brushed.” He pouted, meaning the Toclafane he’d had caring for the Doctor before he got too frustrated with the litany of errors he imagined them to make and just started doing everything himself. “Keeping up with your grooming was a bit beyond the children. In the regeneration I had you in before they pulled a few of the curls right out of your head before I caught on. ‘Course the scalp gets delicate when you’re not eating—I had to up the protein and iron in your nutrient fluid. As soon as your body has the energy you’ll be your old hirsute self again, should I be in the mood for that. On the other hand,” he grinned manically, “I think I enjoy you as you are now.”

             “Master,” the Doctor said slowly, trying to catch the eyes that kept skittering away from his own, “I need you to tell me you’ll open it.”

             “And if I don’t?” The Master said.

             “Don’t be like this, please don’t do this to me.”

“Be like  _this?_ ” The Master asked with a merry sneer. “But this is who  _I_  am. And your pain can’t stop me either. Now we’ve something in common. Isn’t that good? All the self-help books do say effective couples agree on the fundamentals.”

“Either open that box or make what farewells you want. I’ll give you—you deserve the opportunity to say what you’d like to me, but after that I’m going to have to,” the Doctor swallowed the words, gave the Master something that was almost an apology, “I can’t do this, not even for you. I _can’t._ ”

There was a pause. The Master wouldn’t look at his face.

“Sugar water. Soon we can start you on thin milk. Whole milk within a day or two—and then we’re at biscuits.” The Master swallowed. “I think we’ve some pink wafers around here somewhere. If not, maybe in one of the warehouses. You like pink wafers in this body, right? I never really hung about you enough in this form to gather your comparative thoughts on biscuits.”

“Master,” the Doctor said, “Don’t do this, at least say something to me. Please. I don’t want to leave things so—I’m not afraid to die, you know that? But not—” his voice broke, “Not like this.”

“I’ll,” the Master stared out the window. He tried not to let his voice carry even a hint of tone, trying to dampen it like a man would try to smother his lover with a pillow in the night, “ I’ll open the box when you’re better. Give it a few—give it a month, and I’ll open the box.”

“Open it now,” the Doctor insisted, eyes widening, because he’d almost given up, “What’s wrong with opening it—”

“GodDAMMIT, Theta, what do you want from me?” the Master shouted, “I’ll open it, I just want a little time. Can you understand how much you  _cost_  me? What are you even going to do like this, hm? So weak you can’t stand, god, I  _hate_  seeing you like this, and you think, ‘well, there’s an inch, where’s my mile?’ Fucking think for  _once,_  would you?”

He clenched of his hands, which had been shaking in bursts. Their convulsions beat out a rhythm in the air, soundless, touching nothing. He wrestled back a little composure. “When you’re better, I’ll do it. That’ll have to be good enough, that’s what you’re getting.”

“In a month. Promise me.” The Doctor asked softly.

“Oh don’t you  _dare_  demand promises. You broke faith with me long ago. We’ll have no contracts, you and I. I said I’d do it. What’s thirty more days of complicity—you’ll find out in a month if  _I_  care to keep my word, and that’s that.”

“Thank you,” the Doctor caught the Master’s clenched fist and wove his own fingers in, “Thank you.” He brought the knuckles to his mouth and kissed them all, quick and tender, “I know you don’t believe me, you never believe me anymore, but I l—”

The Master snatched his hand back, smoothed his coat down. “Don’t say it. Just don’t say it right now. I don’t want to hear another word from you. For once do us both a favor and do as I tell you.”

The Master stepped behind the other man. “Some reunion. Tell me, are you compelled to spoil everything, or do you just ruin my life by force of habit?” The Doctor opened his mouth, but the Master interrupted him. “I told you, shut  _up._  Let’s get you to a proper bed, you shouldn’t be so agitated when you’re convalescent.” With a sort of spent purposefulness, he wheeled the Doctor’s chair out of the breakfast room and back to their bedroom, helping him up and onto the bed without a word, mouth tight.

The Doctor fell asleep rather quickly—the Master had been right, he’d exhausted himself. When his breathing shifted, indicating that the Doctor was deeply under, the Master laid down on the bed. Slowly, he gave into his compulsion to wrap himself around the taller man, tucking his head into the auburn curls covering the crook of where the Doctor’s neck met his shoulder.

Wrapping his arm around the Doctor’s coat, he pressed insistently back with a palm, flat against the taller man’s stomach. The Doctor, still asleep, with the ancient muscle memory, shifted back into him. Regeneration taught each new body its old secrets. Just like the scope of one’s knowledge flooded into a new mind, new tissue carried strengths and pains it had never physically known. It was like receiving insistent sensory input from a phantom limb.

The Master’s adjustment made them one undivided form on the bed. He could feel the Doctor’s mind pulsing into the next REM stage, so much more active than it had been during his long sleep. The Master closed his eyes and breathed the clean smell of his hair, his skin.

The things I do for you, he thought, wanting to laugh but unequal to the task, and unwilling to hear the sound.

 

***

 

He’d found the Rani in pieces. A great hole gaped in her torso. Her blonde hair was matted with grime. She was missing a hand, and her left leg hung by a gooey thread.

Regeneration seemed to have been delayed by the disenfranchised state of her body. Sometimes the process held off for a period if the body died with severe trauma—playing dead served as a survival technique. The Master tried to help her along. He aligned everything where it should go, tucking her leg with its ripped skin and exposed bone back into its socket, returning her hand when he found it. Cellular regeneration tended to go better when there was a lot of organic material to work with. He waited and hoped she wasn’t too badly damaged to recover. She should, by his calculations, still have a good batch of lives left yet. She had always been less careless with herself than he and the Doctor.

A single gold line, like a thin wire, grew from her spine. It looped up and anchored itself in the charred flesh of her torso. At first the Master thought he was seeing things, that his eyes had been strained by staring at her remains for too long. Then vines of light raced from her spine to her extremities, more and faster, covering her until nothing was left untouched. Her jaw dropped and she gulped in air.

When the visible traces of her regenerative energy faded he went to her and helped her stand. She wobbled like a newborn fawn and shook him off. The Rani looked around the battlefield with wide, terrified eyes that fixed on the other still forms, which lacked her genetic advantage and would never stir again. With the exception of the birds nothing was left alive as far as the eye could see but them—the cell-sniffer bombs had spared not even the vegetation.

Outside the portable shield the Master carried, the bombs scuttled, their tiny legs mincing delicate paths across the field. Where they found living organic tissue they simultaneously emitted a noxious gas that ate right through protective masks and a microbe that consumed cells and spat out more of itself at an alarming rate. The Daleks liked to leave them behind when they couldn’t spare manpower to guard a taken world. They were exceptionally convenient—the regenerative capacity of the Time Lords couldn’t counter something that ate all organic tissue.

The Rani was inconceivably lucky that the Master had arrived when he did. It looked like she had tried to defuse one with a remote device, but hadn’t gotten quite far enough away to escape the blast radius. The Master clucked his tongue. She really should have known better. Sniffers exploded when tampered with, usually killing Time Lords who attempted to disarm them. When a cell-sniffer destroyed itself, the blast created inert food for the other bombs’ microbes, and the Dalek war machine marched on. A crate of the crab-shaped robots could decimate a planetary ecosystem within weeks, rendering it ready for Dalek ‘reallocation,’ as they so succinctly put it.

The Master was too late for the battle, held up by a particularly effective flanking maneuver by the Dalek space-fleet. Given the look of the field, if he’d come much earlier he’d probably be dead or incapacitated himself. Any later, and the Rani would have been reduced to fuel.

She stared at him, not comprehending any of her surroundings, displaying the amnesia that often accompanied regenerations with a high rate of complication.

“Who are we?” she demanded.

“You, my dear, are Ushasmielatrovadex, or more popularly the Rani. I’m an old friend. We seem to be rather at loose ends here,” he gestured at the grass-stripped battle scene, all spent carnage. It was peopled with bodies dissolving under the advance of the amethyst microbe and its host of busy, insectile, steel-grey carrier robots, which paused every so often to emit a violet plume of their biochemical cocktail. The tide of destruction was rolling towards them, slow now, but picking up speed with every second. It was an extraordinary scene that almost aspired to a sick lush gorgeousness.

The Rani looked, bewildered, at the brave new world she’d woken to. The Master thought she might faint on her feet. He offered her an arm.

“Perhaps we could retire to my TARDIS and get you something to drink, or a bed?” He led her away, shield generator in one hand and a new hand-held screwdriver he was experimenting with in the other. As they encountered the cell-sniffers on their way back to what appeared to be a giant, withered old dead tree, the robots smacked against the hard edge of the shield and tripped backwards over themselves, pushed back by its advancing energy field. Shutting the TARDIS door behind them he sat the Rani on his control chair and took them into the Vortex, far away from what had been Helenic Period Terra Alpha.

He had no idea how the Rani of all people had come to be involved in the conflict. Perhaps like him she’d been press-ganged into service. Perhaps he could get the details out of her when she remembered them herself.

 

 

***

 

 

“Mmm.” The Doctor looked over his shoulder. “Settles that question.” It had been almost four days since he’d woken. The Master relied on and resented each of them. They restored the Doctor even as they drew them inexorably closer to the tiny, dark horror in that box.

The Master thought he might have been panicking out of proportion. This was the Doctor, after all, who destroyed by omission, drifted haplessly to murder at the dictates of circumstance and accident, never with intent—whose moral center he trusted implicitly and reviled explicitly.

But on occasion he caught the Doctor looking at him with immense, poorly concealed pity and trepidation. And he remembered all the things the Doctor had done to him, to himself, to the universe at large, to pacify that roar of that moral center. Its call must be as deafening as that of his own drums, such is the vicious scope of its destruction.

                 _Oh god,_  he’d thought, _it’s going to be horrible, whatever it is, and he knows it’s horrible, and he’s going to do it to me anyway_. A pitiful childish bafflement rose in him. Why did the Doctor insist that they be unhappy? All the people who mattered were dead, what perverse need did he have to punish them still, when there was no society left to tell them that anything they did was wrong, no one left who knew enough about it to say with authority that they’d gone too far?

The Master was sprawled out on their bed, disheveled in a suit, and firmly avoided thinking about anything but the moment. It was a particularly satisfying moment to dwell on. The unclothed, unselfconscious Doctor, fresh from a shower, was seated on the bed’s edge, pressing at his own pale skin with his long, elegant fingers. The room’s light was soft and diffuse, and the Doctor’s auburn hair glowed electric red where it caught the shine, and rested in a dark, soft-curled shadow where it didn’t.

The Master felt boneless, looking at him. While he thought it often, even of forms that wouldn’t be conventionally considered terribly attractive, sometimes it still occurred to him as revelation does. It could still his hearts, how very beautiful his Doctor was.

“What question?” The Master asked lazily.

“Whether your screwdriver works by restoring some cellular memory of me or whether you’ve simply co-opted Matrix biodata.”

“Oh does it?”

“It’s biodata-- My tattoo’s gone.” The Doctor rubbed at his right shoulder. “There was a knot pattern right there. I got it when I helped a tribe on Abydeka. There was this flood caused by rogue nannites eating through the dams of the colonists living upstream, long story really, but they wanted to recognize the event. I always meant to find out how Nara Black ink found its way to Abydeka anyway.” Body modification of any kind tended to horrify or amuse Gallifreans, who considered it grossly tribal, to the extent that wearing make-up was quite the radical liberal-universalist statement.

“You let them mark you?” The Master’s emotional response was tangled. He didn’t blindly ascribe to his species’ taboos, but the idea caught him by surprise. He’d never really given any thought to it, other than observing  _irezumi_  when he’d been in Edo last. There was a stab of possessive jealousy that something touched and marred the Doctor and it wasn’t him. And a fair current of arousal at the image of this serene version of his lover, all lazy sweetness, squirming with closed eyes, biting a plump lower lip, poised under a chisel held by a steady hand, the Nara Black ink blossoming blue green under his pale skin. Defiling and decorating.

                “What did it look like?” The Master sat up and crawled over to him, trailed his fingers over the skin in question. It was slightly warmer than his own, as always.

                “A stylized wave to represent the flood water. Looked rather like a highly modified Celtic knot pattern to me.” The Doctor caught the Master’s hand, which was still investigating the area, drumming over the skin, and used it to pull the Master flat against his back. “Stop fidgeting, would you?” He asked with no heat in his voice.

He let the Doctor’s momentum guide him. He splayed his palms over the Doctor’s chest and settled his legs on either side of the other man to accommodate him, so that they were somewhat enfolded and he could speak almost directly into the Doctor’s ear.

                “If you miss it, you should get it again.” The Master surprised himself with how definitive his answer was. The idea appealed to his sybaritic nature, and the more he thought of it the less strange it seemed. The more perfect. There was an enchantment to the permanence of leaving an indelible mark—it would be something of the Master’s own design and execution, obviously, no anonymous artisan was going to touch the Doctor.

                “I can hardly go back and ask the Abydekan tribesmen for a do-over.” The Doctor pointed out. “And it’s not terribly vital. It was a lovely little thing, though.”

                “No need to go back. I’d sort it out myself.” He raised a hand to card through the Doctor’s long hair and imagined an intricate traditional  _kakushibori_  on the inside of his thigh. Some hidden carving only they would know about, a flower with the Master’s circular signet secreted among the petals.

He remembered his frustration of some months ago that the Doctor’s fifth body bore no proof of having been his so completely, and for so long. He need never feel like that again.Something as elegantly simple as an image would remind the Doctor whose he was. The Master could feel his lips fighting to stretch in a contented cat smile, just picturing it. He would always, always know it was there. Waiting for him.

Such possessive gestures as sharing a name or physically demonstrating a union had been chortled at among his species, thought unsophisticated. But the Master hadn’t ever really cared much for the stilted, self-conscious posturing of the other Time Lords. Gallifreyans had mocked difference, sentiment and passion with the facility and contempt only really attained by the desperately jealous. At least he and the Doctor had always understood that, and refused to be cowed by such pettiness.

“Could be fun,” the Master whispered into the Doctor’s ear, enticing, “I can draw this time around, still—that seems to stick through my regenerations. How do you fancy a chrysanthemum? The imperial flower. Well, among other less noble associations,” the Master grinned softly. With its tightly gathered petals, the flower had a long association with certain homosexual acts in Japanese iconography.

                The Doctor laughed. Said, “Thanks, but I’ll have to decline,” as if nothing had ever been more ridiculous, as if he’d never even consider it. Which was really, really the wrong answer.

                The Master snapped the Doctor’s head back. He moved so suddenly that the Doctor choked out a startled gasp. The Master held him at a painful angle, with one hand fisted in his long hair, while running his fingers along the Doctor’s throat in slow, soothing motions.

                “Since when do you get to decide what we’re doing, hm?” He almost whispered into the Doctor’s ear. “If I want to carve my name into your skin you’ll thank me for acknowledging you. So  _emboldened_  by your little stunt. Do you think I’ve forgiven what you did to me, or whatever it is you’re planning on doing?” He tightened his grip on the Doctor’s neck. “And with such deliberate intent. If I snapped your neck now it’d be a crime of passion, not premeditated. Oh Doctor, it wouldn’t be half as vicious as what you managed. You should be thanking me.”

                “Thank you Master.” The Doctor rasped out, seeing what was needed to calm the Master and playing into his partner with the ease of long experience. A performative scum of fear bubbled through the Doctor’s words. It was a reaction, and after the past months it was so wonderful to hear the Master thought he have might gasped if he hadn’t bitten his lip.

                Shocked that the Doctor was submitting, the Master couldn’t help it. His response was a little Pavlovian. He was hard against the Doctor’s back, and hissing low like the snake he briefly was.

                “Again.”

                “Thank—thank you, Master.” The Master’s unoccupied hand stole down to find the Doctor’s cock, and wrapped around it. The Master’s expression was a little blissful, and he drew lazy circles on the Doctor’s prone throat. He’d not touched his weak lover since he’d woken, respecting his frailty. That same caution now dulled his anger, but not his lust.

                “I wish you were well enough for half the things I want to do to you.” He admitted, beginning to give the Doctor a slow hand job, thumb stroking at the vein running the length of that pale cock. He wanted to sully its whiteness, make it flush with blood, just like the Doctor’s vermillion, gulping throat. His fingers flitted between long strokes and drumming the head. “Mm,” he craned his head around and licked at the Doctor’s shuddering Adam’s apple, “You can’t know how much I want inside you again. Waiting feels like agony, like my skin’s burning,” he laughed, “and I should know.”

He left unstated the implication that the Doctor should be slavishly grateful that the Master wasn’t taking what he wanted regardless. He was taking care of the Doctor—it was implicit in controlling the other man that he knew what was best, that he was capable of putting the Doctor to better use than the Doctor ever found for himself.

“Thank you for waiting,” the Doctor murmured, and the Master relished his concession that his body was so completely the Master’s that not being fucked right back into a coma was a privilege, not a right.

                “You didn’t then? Not when I was,” the Doctor paused to pick the word least likely to rankle the other Time Lord, “sleeping?” It didn’t occur to the Doctor to feel violated about the prospect—they’d passed such small sins between them long ago.

                “Once.” The Master admitted, not ashamed to have exercised that prerogative, “But let’s not talk about what you reduced me to, hm?” He squeezed the flesh in his hand, drawing on it in a long, tight stroke, “I’d much rather hear you scream. As you’re a bit weak for that, I’ll settle for whimpers. Keen if you must, you used to do it so prettily.”

The unrelenting clench of the Master’s fist on his cock reminded the Doctor, with a sweep of nostalgic pain, of how good it felt to be fully inside the other Time Lord. He hadn’t known that sweetness since a cold, damp night spent in a cave centuries ago. He should have been kinder, should have said the right words instead of the easy ones. Should have stayed, should have lived up to his better nature and  _tried_. It wouldn’t have cost him anything but pride, and now he might never have that again.

The prospect hurt but the Doctor suppressed it, like he suppressed the deep-structure ache at the invasive thing tethering their minds together, which stung all the more because once they’d had something similar in nature but infinitely finer in realization. The Doctor endured with the same fortitude that had let him survive the horror of the War, and his crushing loneliness in its wake. But he was tired, and he wanted to give in to something that would surpass the low ache of living. If it could only be for tonight, that wouldn’t cheapen it. Hadn’t he and Koschei always dreamed of running away together?

The Doctor laid his head back on the other time Lord’s shoulder, turning his lips to meet the cheek, and whispered “Master,” feeling the long shudder work its way down the body pressed against his own. The Master breathed harder and worked the Doctor’s cock in earnest, abandoning his teasing pace for something still leisurely but more purposeful.

“That’s it, pet, give it to me.”

“Master,” the Doctor whimpered softly right on cue, into his partner’s skin. He’d turned kittenish with physical exhaustion from pressing his body into this so soon after having woken.

But he didn’t want to stop, didn’t think he’d survive if the Master stopped. Those had been agonizingly lonely months for the Doctor, completely detached from the world outside his own body. He hated few things more than being alone with himself. The nature of his scheme meant he’d had little but the Master on the brain, and that always left him eager for just this kind of confrontation. His coma had been frustrating in every sense of the word.

The Master opened his mouth to inquire how it felt, but before he could get a word out the Doctor preempted him with “Good,  _god,_  exquisite, just like that, you’re so, so—that’s so perfect,” and the Master smiled smugly at how well the Doctor knew him, upping his tempo, adding little flourishes in accordance with how prettily the Doctor appreciated his efforts.

A breathy, half-shrieked “oh  _God!_  Master!” when he coated an index finger with slippery precome and used it to trace a delicate circle around the perimeter of the head of the Doctor’s cock, before he palmed it and gently squeezed, earned the Doctor the fingers of the Master’s idle hand playing at his entrance, toying with the skin.

The Master slid away slowly, their sweat-slick skin clinging, and the Doctor, eyes wide and bereft, caught at his retreating arm with an enervated panic.

“Where are you—” The Doctor began, but the Master pushed him up and back on the bed. He pressed his palms again to the Doctor’s chest, guiding him to lay down, and slid between his legs, parting them and licking his way up the insides of the Doctor’s thighs before descending with a voracious mouth on the Doctor’s twitching cock.

“Ah!” The Doctor’s head lolled back, eyes wide, and he buried his hands in the Master’s short, velveteen hair automatically. One of the Master’s hands lingered on the Doctor’s chest, tapping, but its rhythm was growing slower, more indolent. The other wrapped around the based of the Doctor’s cock, guiding it into his mouth and stroking the bereft body of it while he focused on tonguing the head or licking the frenulum.

Shaking, his entire body wracked with exhaustion and adrenaline, the Doctor started to cry. Looking up, the Master frowned in confusion, but continued when he realized it was just a reaction to the physical stress. Seeing how close the Doctor was, he shoved his mouth all the way down, until his nose was smashed against the Doctor’s pelvis. He closed his eyes and _swallowed,_ triggering the Doctor’s climax. He let the spurts hit the back of his throat, licking the underside until the aftershocks passed, only sliding off when he was sure the Doctor was fully spent.

Crawling up the Doctor’s chest, he slid his tongue into the other man’s slack mouth, and then retraced the tear tracks running down his face in long licks, savoring the salt. This Doctor always tasted of pumpkin, and, funnily enough, ginger to him. The salinity of the skin just heightened the flavor.

Idly he shifted back down, giving the Doctor two of his fingers to suck and moisten in his mouth. He removed them only to work into the Doctor’s ass, gently, curling and dragging them inside until the Doctor was quivering like jelly. Too drained to get hard again, the Doctor simple stared with big glass glazed eyes, muttering wordlessly in pleasure and petting at the Master’s hair. When the Master felt satisfied, he withdrew, and the Doctor weakly held out his trembling arms to him, embracing him as tightly as his lassitude could permit.

“Can I say it?” he asked, not wanting to be so churlish as to repay what he’d just been given with something the Master didn’t want to hear, but  _needing_  to voice it.

“If you must,” the Master muttered tonelessly, but from him that was nearly enthusiastic permission.

“I love you. I love what you do to me. No one makes me  _feel_  like you do.” He said it in a way that implied this extended outside the haven of their bed.

“I love you so, so much,” the Doctor moved his lax hand to the Master’s hard length, only to have it caught, entwined with the Master’s fingers and pressed to the bed.

“You’re too weak still to be reciprocating any favors,” the Master rebuked.

“But I want to. I missed touching you. And you’re still—you still need me.”

“No need to push yourself into regenerating over it,” the Master snorted, rolling the boneless Doctor over so that his dick was pressed into the Doctor’s arse, “We can compromise, hm? Press back into me,” he instructed, and the Doctor complied as readily as he could. He thrust into the Doctor’s sweat slick ass cheeks, keeping a restrained rhythm. Soon he spilt himself all over the Doctor’s skin, whispering his name, squeezing the hand that still clutched his on the sheets.

They slept. For the first time since the period when they were half psychically bound to each other as young men had come to an abrupt, messy end, they were comfortable enough in sleep to press into each other’s dreams. The Doctor walked through a Puccini opera, with the notes made tangible and given mass. The Master dreamed of sakura, their petals curling up into fire and falling away in ashes that pulsed to the beat of his drums as they drifted down into a dark, shapeless expanse that resembled the Doctor’s hollowed-out mind. The drumbeat was as terrible and indefatigable as he himself was.

The Master woke up with a start, as he often did, and fitfully settled himself back into sleep. This time he dreamed Ushas, perched in the unprotective shade of a parasol with a handle made of bone. She looked both frightened and wistful. Her imploring eyes were fixed on him, just as they had been when he saw her truly die.

The Doctor, still asleep, curled into him more tightly, not noticing their uncomfortable stickiness, and with his mind pulled the Master out of his nightmare like a tide moves the sand. Slow and determined, they came to share an improbable, amusing dream of taking tea with some Sea Devils and a bubbly, whip-sharp professor they’d both thought brilliant in their seventies, who was filching all the muffins and telling good enough jokes that they didn’t much object.

In the morning, they woke simultaneously, eyes opening already looking at each other, the Doctor pressed a kiss to the Master’s temple and slipped out to clean himself off. The Doctor had the grace not to pry into the Rani’s demise. He would not mention it until the Master brought it up himself. In his absence the Master drifted into his vacated warm spot and curled up to go back to sleep, feeling safer than he had in centuries.

But when he fully woke the lurking box reoccurred to him, like a toothache suppressed by sleep flooding back into his awareness. Of course this was temporary, he thought, resigned to bitterness. What had he expected? The Doctor couldn’t ever just be content. He needed the teeming universe, flooding into his senses and complicating everything. He didn’t even know how to go about simply being satisfied.

In the end the Master consigned his fantasy of marking the Doctor to the high mental rubbish heap that held all his other unrealized impulses. All the things he’d even thought to want for them, but had been unable to say to the Doctor.

                Because there wasn’t any point to it. Not really, not if the Doctor didn’t want it too.

                He only thought of it again once, when the Doctor passed him a plate at breakfast a few days later and the motion revealed the clear, blue-veined delicacy of the inside of his wrist, presenting to the Master the notion of  _nagasode_ , an image just there. He looked down at his black pudding and speared it so hard the plate clattered. The Doctor glanced over, a little confused, but didn’t comment, and went back to the novel he was idly perusing in between bites of honeydew. It had been, the Master told himself, a stupid idea anyway.

 

 

***

 

 

 

 

 

This was a war without a front. There was nowhere to retreat, no real refuge anywhere in space or time. Anywhere a TARDIS had traveled, Dalek technology latched onto, sucking on the path through the vortex like parasitic creatures. They left no safe place to hide, to escape the battle. They made none of the fine liminal judgments of who was and was not a renegade that the Time Lords themselves did.

The Rani had been pulled into the conflict after successfully dodging increasingly desperate Time Lord pleas for her to come into the Citadel, with all her sins pardoned, and vow allegiance. A Dalek squad arrived on her pet planet Miasimia Goria, intent on burning through her subjects to get at her, not terribly interested in her history of noninvolvement. They saw only a dangerously competent Time Lord and sought to remove the cancer of her potential before it metastasized. When she told the Master that it had taken them less than four hours to reduce centuries of her work to ashes, she was as shaken as he’d ever seen her.

She looked small in a white shirt of his, miles too big for her diminutive new body, belted with a salmon-colored silk tie from Earth. She inspected her new legs—she wasn’t terribly tall this time—incased in some of his old velvet leggings. He had her rub her hands on the material and then put it down so that the TCE had some organic material to latch onto.

The Rani watched with some scientific appreciation of his toy, now that it was disassociated from the nauseating frying-fat smell that usually accompanied a primitive being shrunk. Wearing his clothes was a trifle awkward. She wanted to grouse that he’d shrunken the pants a tad too much, but he was being exceptionally good to her, for him, and anything was better than washing and redressing in clothes irreparably stained with the gore of her own lost body.

The regeneration sickness has largely passed. She was done throwing up and had recovered all of her memories. The suspicion that some of them could have slipped away and she’d never know, which tended to haunt her after she’s regenerated, for no particular reason other than that she despised the loss of control it represented, continued to taunt her. She was still shaky on her feet, wary, getting accustomed to her new body.

They were sitting in the kitchen of his TARDIS, all stainless steel and dark wood. The ship was set to a Traken Third Keeper style he found both lovely and ironic, considering what had become of its planet of origin.

“I had nine billion people.” She muttered, taking a sip of the glass of water he’d offered her. He put a hand on top of hers, and she didn’t seem to feel it. “Nine  _billion_. And- and for _nothing,_  not to any end. Such a waste.”

He looked about him at the graceful, organic arches and wondered idly about the population of the empire felled in an instant by the collapse of Logopolis’s anti-entropic efforts. That had to have been—well. He hadn’t meant to do it. ‘Sloppy’ and ‘pointless’ weren’t his favorite adjectives.

“Surely you didn’t care all that much about the primitives?” He tried, wondering if the Rani was just resentful of having failed, having her work interrupted, both of which seem so much more quintessentially  _her_  than this vacant expression. It unnerved him, because Ushas was the predictable, dependable one.

“They were  _my_  primitives.” She hissed. Ah. That he could understand. “My work. My people. I want the Dalek emperor to  _burn_.” She took a swig of her water and swished it about her mouth, before continuing, meditative and unconcerned. “I’m vaguely curious as to whether he’ll scream if I melt off his armor and give his banal biological form a chemical bath.” She giggled girlishly. “And anyone who wants to interrupt my experiments for a chat in the future can look to them for an example of how well I treat my callers.”

“What if I should want to drop by and check up on you?” The Master raised his eyebrows to give her a faux hurt look, trying to joke her down from her rage and knowing he’d succeeded when she smiled self-mockingly at him.

“Well, you’re not completely useless,” she amended. “So you may as well come to tea, provided you’re prepared to assist in a few trials and you bring good nosh. Speaking of tea, how’s he?”

“How should I know?”

She gave a barking laugh.

“The middle of a war? Please. You know where he is right now. You know what his assignment is. You think he’s doing it wrong.”

He didn’t say anything to confirm her accusations, but if the Doctor would establish a damn mine field blockade over the planet he’s guarding, rigging up something like the signal trigger mechanism sonar device similar to a laser they’d made during that encounter with the aquatic Silurians, both the Doctor and the target he was sitting on would be a damn sight better protected. Had the Doctor learned nothing from that encounter about the importance of tight security?

“The look on your face.” The Rani smirked. “You never change. It’s sweet actually. You’re my universal constant.”

“Shut up, Ushi.” He retorted, and she scrunched her nose in adorable disgust at the diminutive of her real name. She hated the twee old word she hadn’t heard in centuries, and she was fresh out of water.

“Don’t you have wine,  _Kosh?_  Anything good?”

“And why should I share the good stuff?” He grinned.

“Because I’m your best friend who still talks to you? Besides, only alcoholics drink alone. I hope I don’t have to hold an intervention for you. It’d be rather ill attended. Well, Thete would show up with cookies and punch and whine up an oncoming-storm about how your drinking drove you to immorality.”

“God no, he can’t bake. Remember when he  _burnt_  pasta?” The Master’s facial expression conveyed the degree of loathing only attained by former significant others who had once had to eat their partner’s cooking endeavors with smiles and good grace (because it was their anniversary and he’d  _really_   _tried,_  the idiot) and then run to the bathroom to gag up pasta bolognaise that was alternately mushy and crispy. “Anything but that.”

“Does anything include Shobogan Merlot?”

“It might.” He conceded, popping up to fetch a bottle from the cellar the TARDIS had conveniently relocated behind the door that normally led to a long-unused formal dining room.

The Rani took advantage of his absence to observe the flowing girders erupting in brisk, almost masculine stylized flowers at their capitols, to run a considering hand over the dark marble table top, engraved with a pattern she blinked and recognized as an artistic model of the structure of water molecules. Some TARDISes did get creative when they were allowed to run free—some people even ascribed different ‘personalities’ to the things, though she didn’t credit it.

“What is this theme, art deco?” She called down the stairs after him. He’d disappeared into the darkness.

“Not quite,” he shouted back, pleased because her general ignorance of the style’s planet of origin probably meant she didn’t hear about that little ‘oops, I lost a chunk of the universe, Traken, what Traken?’ debacle, and he wouldn’t on the receiving end of her caustic tongue about it. He was awfully pleased she was too absorbed with her science to bother to check up on the journals covering major history shifting time-distortions. Probably hard to follow subscriptions as an exile: he’d just always done the leapfrogging route and pilfered the Matrix directly. All the results, none of the subscriber’s fees.

But remembering the aquatic Silurians, he kept reminding himself to see what became of  _The Clangers_. He’d been following that, and then no one bothered to put it out on DVD. Did humans have no sense of what was important? All of  _The Endurance_  he could shake a TCE at, and never the bloody Clangers! It was enough to make you want to destroy Japan.

“So are you traveling with me for a while then?” The Master ascended the stairs and planted a bottle of Merlot in front of her. He turned his back to find glasses. She was surprised, because he was normally anything but direct. And it was a little unusual for him, for either of them, really, to want companionship. But she didn’t currently possess a TARDIS, and he was probably going to need help. They had a common enemy. She had nothing better to do. She was tired and sick and vulnerable and had missed him, missed both of them, sniping at each other and skipping class to snog and trying to wheedle her into sharing notes the night before the exam.

Ushas missed being young and invincible, being part of a trio and having her best friends at her side, coming up with some brilliant mischief and saying terrible, hilarious things about the professors they all loathed. They’d been so unguardedly happy then. She’d been productive since, she was proud of everything she’d accomplished (everything she’d just lost, actually), but she couldn’t really say she’d been  _happy_  in the past centuries. Not like that. It hadn’t seemed important, or really possible.

She didn’t want to go through the war, in which she was now inextricably involved, alone.

“Guess I am.” She said neutrally, and his shoulders seemed to relax, which was odd because she’d not noticed any tension in them before. But that wasn’t so surprising. The Master was a performer, and nothing if not good at what he did, she could give him that.

“Does he have anyone?” She refused to be cowed out of her curiosity, and, to be entirely honest, her concern, because this was so huge and terrible a conflict that it swept away lingering anger and antipathy as if it had never been, and Koschei’s touchiness regarding serious discussion of his favorite subject wasn’t more important than her hope that Theta won’t have to do this alone.

“No.” The Master set down the glasses, not looking at her. He wasn’t pretending ignorance, which was refreshing. “He dropped off his latest pets. Suppose he didn’t want to send them home as shoeboxes of ash. He’s alone.”

“Poor bastard.” She muttered.

“He’ll survive.” And there was the ghost of guilt on his face, because he always wanted the Doctor alone and vulnerable, cut off as he himself was. But now, like this, it was useless to him, and seeing what it did to the Doctor he half wished he never wanted it at all. And he couldn’t quite bring himself to articulate that, not even in the privacy of his mind.

“I hope so.” This was not going to be a clean war, and she had no inherent faith in her people’s ability to win. Ushas had looked at the scope of the battle as laid out to her by the Master’s archives and seen fallen planets and stolen technology and every chance of the death of her species: the end of all life in the universe that doesn’t speak in screams and sleep in its armor. Even the Doctor, persistent as a weed, had no guarantees in this.

Suddenly a shadow was over her, and she looked up, curious. Koschei grabbed her face with one hand.

“He’ll survive.” The Master repeated in a stone cold tone. He was uttering an absolute truth, the way people in suicide cults speak of their religion. He dropped her head abruptly and turned away.

The Rani suddenly understood something she never had before—why the people of some planets erupted in jibbering, screaming terror upon hearing her childhood friend would be calling to pay them his regards. The look in his eyes carried implicit threat—he could, he would, do so much more than kill you.

“Yes. I suppose he must.” She reassured him, because the Master clearly wanted so badly to hear it repeated to him in another’s voice, not just the echoes of his own words tossed back by TARDIS walls on terrible days. The Rani could tell that even from the brief telepathic contact she snuck in during the touch.

While normally the Rani had no use for tact and considered it beneath her, she could make an exception for her oldest friend and new flat mate.

And if anyone lived, it would be the two them. She’d meant her joke. The Doctor and the Master were as inexorable as any scientific law she knew. Perhaps that was what she liked about them.

 

***

 

THIS CHAPTER UNFINISHED. 


End file.
